Re: IDE

[Lluís <xscript@gmx.net>]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
[...]
>> For C/C++, the community has Irony and Rtags, both based on libclang. If 
>> libclang is unacceptable for you, you probably know a more appropriate 
>> mailing list to bring that up at.

> Let's not reiterate past discussions: you forget CEDET.

Just thinking out loud: it seems to me that many people forget that CEDET is,
from my understanding, a framework for writing tools first, and a set of such
example tools later.


> And if anyone _really_ cares about supporting C/C++, they should be
> working with and on GCC's libcc1, which is available for quite some
> time already.

If this is the libgcc1 you mean [1], I'm not sure it's suitable for code
completion. Instead, GCC should be modified to hook into the frontend parser or
the generic AST and then parsing that, which is no small feat. Fortunately,
hooking is already possible using GCC plugins [2].

[1] http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gccint/Libgcc.html
[2] http://www.codesynthesis.com/~boris/blog/2010/05/03/parsing-cxx-with-gcc-plugin-part-1/

With this, it's a relatively easy (but time-consuming) task to build an external
tool that parses files on-demand. The ideal would be some kind of persistent
daemon+database, as was discussed in the CEDET list quite some time ago, but
that's an entirely different story.


[...]
>> Would you expect the programs mentioned above to become a part of Emacs? 

> I expect to see a coherent, orchestrated effort towards having an IDE
> mode in Emacs.  I don't see it, certainly not in discussions on this
> list.  I also don't see any commits that would provide evidence of
> such an effort.

> If such activities happen somewhere else, I would suggest their
> participants to come here and work with and within the core.  For
> starters, I don't imagine they would succeed without some significant
> changes and additions in the core infrastructure.  The place to
> discuss that is here.

I think that things are happening outside (completion, automatic project
detection, etc) because there is no common goal on what features should be
available and through what interface.

This, and that giving an opinion on these topics is way much less work than
actually implementing them (and I include myself on the first group of
non-implementors).


Cheers,
  Lluis

-- 
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