[ABothe]

Hi Rainer(?),

I haven't found any other way of feedback - anyway:

What do you think about importing the code completion features from D-IDE/Mono-D into VisualD? I mean - strong debugging capabilities for Windows + Decent completion in one IDE!
-- Or, what do you think of it if I helped you to import everything into VisualD? - Probably a way better question

I'm currently working on very advanced completion features like analyzing and resolving mixin expressions, pre-compile time CTFE and template parameter type deduction etc. - so I think it'd be the absolutely ultimate thing to create one extremely decent IDE support for D for Windows.

Since I don't really want to spend further time on improving IDE-related things (like project building, project management and debugging) in D-IDE I think it'd be the best way if we could manage to work together

Although my plugin code is written entirely in C#, it actually should be possible to link C# and D code together somehow - so this shall not be a primary problem!

Anyway I'd really appreciate it to share features in order to have "The" D IDE for Windows!


[Edit] I've externalized all parser/resolver/completion engine sources so it's neither bound to D-IDE nor Mono-D anymore - you can view the sources @ https://github.com/aBothe/D_Parser

[sagitario]

Hi Alexander (?) ,

sorry for the late reply, I was rather busy with non-D stuff lately.

Your proposal sounds quite interesting.

My first approach at creating a plug-in for Visual Studio was also in C# and some C++ and D, but I was not very happy with it (although it even had a compile time view). I very much prefer that we eat our own dog food and do it in D as much as possible. How hard would it be to port your code to D? Would it improve performance or make it worse?

I have recently refactored my parser and semantic analysis code to run in its own process (mainly to avoid the GC causing stalls too long for an interactive application) and it now implements a local COM server. The semantic analysis itself is very unfinished, though. A number of operations still use the compiler generated browse info because of this (like "Goto Definition").

Maybe you can build on and extend the (currently undocumented and still in flux) interface in http://www.dsource.org/projects/visuald/browser/trunk/vdc/ivdserver.d to replace the server used by Visual D.
I only took a short look at your code so far, but I guess it might not be too hard to implement the interface. I'm not a C# expert, but I think creating a COM server in C# should also be painless.

Rainer

[ABothe]

Wow, it seems that the entire VS plugin architecture is totally different to the MonoDevelop one :/
- I originally thought that there was some kind of central plugin definition manifest that allows the developer to define separate modules and class paths, at least for C# dlls, so integrating some kind of event handlers (that catch typing events etc. and redirect it to the parser module where the events had been processed and returned a list of completion entries to show) wouldn't be that hard.

But yeah, managed vs. native - hmm.
I've never worked with COM or COM infrastructure at all, so I don't really know how realizing a com server that provides parser/resolver/completion interfaces could happen.
Furthermore I'm wondering how the NSIS can execute CIL code via that one plugin which is publicly available - everything probably without COM server.
So if it's possible to connect native code somehow with managed code, it'd be very nice and helpful

[sagitario]

[sagitario]

Hi Alexander,

I have just committed a wrapper that uses your DParser library as a "semantic server" for Visual D: https://github.com/rainers/visuald/tree/master/vdc/abothe

It works ok for the tooltips, but not yet for the completion. Maybe you can have a look what might be wrong with it (it mostly shows nothing, sometimes all the keywords).

I haven't yet checked how DParser deals with import paths and other settings, so there is a bit more to do to make it work.

The wrapper currently will only run with a new version of Visual D and an additional registry entry. I can build and upload a new rc if you are interested.

Rainer