Re: IDE

[David Kastrup]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

>> From: "John Wiegley" <address@hidden>
>> Date: Sat, 10 Oct 2015 11:31:13 -0700
>> 
>> To reiterate: I think Emacs becomes more of an IDE when it provides
>> the backbone of an IDE, and not when it looks like one.
>
> I don't think this will fly.  In effect, you are telling Emacs users
> they will have to code their own IDE by using the infrastructure
> (a.k.a. "backbone") that we provide.

I don't see that.  He is telling Emacs developers they'll be able to
rely on common infrastructure for creating an IDE catered to some
particular language/system.

If we are talking about smart completion and debugging support for
languages compiled with GCC, this could mean a lot of things working out
of the box (source-level debugging with expression
evaluation/inspection, syntactic indentation, jumping by statements or
other logical units, semantic information and completion etc etc) before
you even know the language we are talking about.

> To me, an IDE is not a set of functionalities.  It's a coherent
> application that provides an IDE-like look-and-feel, and all the
> related functions already integrated and ready for me to be used.

Without a uniform framework to create such IDEs, no uniformly usable IDE
for different languages will fall out.

> We cannot provide a toolbox and tell users make your own IDE from
> these tools.

It wouldn't be the task of the users to create those.

> Integrating those tools together is a non-trivial task a user should
> not be expected to perform.

Forcing every developer to redo it from scratch will lead to very spotty
and inconsistent support of languages.

-- 
David Kastrup