Re: What IDE features do we need? defaults!]

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:52:16 +0000
> From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>
> Cc: emacs-devel@gnu.org
> 
> By contrast, using etags, it could easily take me over a minute to
> locate a definition; firstly, M-. took about 4 seconds (on a 2.8 GHz
> processor), because the TAGS file was so big.

This is a one-time penalty, so it can be alleviated by visiting the
TAGS table automatically at startup, or when the (yet non-existent)
``project file'' is read in preparation for working on a project.

> Very often, I'd have to do C-u M-. many times to actually locate the
> definition.

This is indeed a much more serious problem.

In addition, etags does not really grok C++ and Java style
object-oriented languages, so it cannot, for example, let you complete
on class members, or show signatures of class methods, whether in
tooltips or elsewhere.

> Improving etags this way would be more of a stop-gap than a solution.
> It just isn't powerful enough for that sort of proprietary environment.

I don't see why not; could you explain?

OTOH, we could also base an Emacs solution on something like ID-Utils,
but that would require to develop parsers for popular languages such
as C++, Java, Python, etc.  As yet another alternative, we could use
Ebrowse, although it, too, needs some work to catch up with current
C++ standards (from a few blatant bugs I recently uncovered in
Ebrowse, I conclude that it is almost unused).