Re: IDE

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 10/10/2015 11:30 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:

> I was talking about working on IDE, not on completion.  And for the
> most popular languages in the industry, not just for some a few niche
> languages.

You quoted the message that said "accurate code completion and powerful 
refactoring support". I can agree that the latter is barely touched (*), 
but it looked like you ignored the former.

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

I was enumerating external programs. But sure, CEDET is a yet another 
option for completion. Though not too "accurate" one, if we're talking 
anything but C.

> 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.

I wasn't aware of it. Is its API stable? Is it a good-enough replacement 
for libclang for the purposes of completion?

If you like, I can pass along the request to use it as an alternative to 
the Irony and Rtags issue trackers. But some more details wouldn't hurt, 
it's hard for me to advocate libcc1 myself.

> Instead, all we have is heated discussions and hurt feelings.  That
> will never get us anywhere.

My feelings aren't hurt, I just meant to add more information to the 
discussion.

> 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.

We definitely could have more in this department, yes. But what would 
you even call an "IDE mode"? A fixed multi-window setup a la ECB?

I prefer to approach this problem from the bottom - like adding new 
commands that perform certain advanced functions.

> If such activities happen somewhere else, I would suggest their
> participants to come here and work with and within the core.

That's... unlikely. At least, for most of them. My guess is that the 
mailing list interface is off-putting, but maybe we just need a better 
"community outreach" program, or something like that.

That would be something for the new maintainer(s) to consider.

> 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.

For refactoring, yes. But just "accurate code completion", without 
extras like expanding the arguments or displaying the method source, can 
be (and is, in certain packages) implemented though the 
completion-at-point-function interface, present in Emacs since 24.1.

And you can have the extras using Company, which should be bundled with 
Emacs in the upcoming version. Or if the ELPA bundling isn't ready by 
then, in the version after that.

> Then what exactly is the nature of your objections to my observations?
> It seems we agree on the bottom line: no one works on this.  The
> reasons are immaterial.

If anything, my view of the situation is a lot brighter than yours.

I also should have more time at the end of this month to put into 
improving xref, which is a step, as you know, in adding a common 
framework for some of the IDE-ish features.

(*) There are some third-party packages providing refactoring commands 
(for dynamic languages, mostly), but they would definitely benefit from 
a nice common UI.