Mmrnmhrm Developer Notes

Thesis document for the Mmrnmrhm project: http://web.ist.utl.pt/bruno.d.o.medeiros/thesisdoc-v4final.pdf
The info available there is:

• Chapter 2: Very basic overview of the Eclipse Platform, and the extension capabalities for an IDE. Noting new for Eclipse plug-in developers, and also not much use for newbies.
• Chapter 3: General topics for the creation of feature-rich IDEs, Eclipse based or not, but heavily inspired on JDT. Has some use useful info.
• Chapter 4: Details the implementation of Mmrnmhrm. Useful to get an overview of the internals of Mmrnmhrm.

Development Tasks on the TODO list:

• Further integration with DLTK
  • Code Templates - shouldn't take too long
  • Call Hierarchy - shouldn't not be too complicated, but also I don't see as very useful.

• Semantic engine improvements
  • Better find-ref - leave it for me (BrunoM)
  • Test cases - easy for anyone to contribute

• Descent integration
  • Big question: should the development of the Mmrnmhrm custom semantic engine (aka dtool) be continued, or should DMD engine be used? (Descent's approach) Still unclear. A nice implementation of code completion using DMD's engine is necessary (for me at least) to prove DMD's engine worthiness.

• Code formatter (problem: uses Descent code formatter uses Public AST and not DMD AST -> yet another AST to maintain, and also a potential performance issue)

• Debugging and Descent's debugger
  • Some improvements could be made here, but I have to look into the capabilites of Descent's debugger further.
  • DLTK has some stuff to offer here, but is worth (haven't looked much into it).

• Builder improvements: Interesting thing to have:
  • Support for _extended_ build folder
  • Module Dependency analysis, timestamp verification (for conditional compilation instead of full). Interesting but rebuild should handle the job now.

• Parser error recovery improvements (useful for better code completion)
  • Given the ported nature of the parser, extensively adapting it is job adequate only for hardcore developer or Walter itself :/.
  • But some error recovery using wrappers should be possible already.