Re: IDE

[David Engster]

Eli Zaretskii writes:
>> From: "John Wiegley" <address@hidden>
>> Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2015 15:58:57 -0700
>> 
>
>> >>>>> Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden> writes:
>> 
>> > My already-stated impression is that it's over-specialized and tightly
>> > coupled.
>> >
>> > Not saying that the problem domain is easy, but being able to use different
>> > pieces of the solution separately would go a long way towards alleviating
>> > the complaint that certain other parts are incomplete.
>> >
>> > Especially if it were easier to swap in different solutions for some of
>> > those parts (and do entirely without some others), and do that in not too
>> > many lines, all as part of the user's configuration.
>> 
>> You've taken the reply right out of my mouth, Dmitry. David's response was
>> also very much in line with my thinking. As I said before, if CEDET were the
>> answer to our questions, we wouldn't still be asking them.
>
> Could it be that we don't understand the answer?
>
> I'd suggest to be very careful with such conclusions.  They can only
> be valid when based on a detailed analysis of what is and isn't in
> CEDET, and on good knowledge and understanding of its design and
> implementation.  My impression so far is that neither is particularly
> true, and my evidence is the number of times Eric and David Engster
> described some CEDET features that came as a surprise to us.
>
> I'm quite sure CEDET has collected and expressed in code a lot of
> experience and solutions to many problems that arise in the context of
> building an IDE.  It's OK to discard that, if we sure that's the
> proverbial 1st variant everyone throws away, but we need first to be
> sure we know what we are discarding.

Actually, Eric rewrote Semantic once already...

>From the discussion so far, I think the main issue at least w.r.t. to
Semantic is: do you actually want Semantic's tag-based system, or more
general: do you want quick access to AST information in your buffer?

If I understand Dmitry correctly, he is not really interested in that,
as for dynamic languages, the AST information is usually missing
important information (unless you bother to implement a complete
frontend). He'd rather call external binaries for complicated stuff like
completion, and use simpler tools (like pure regexp-based parsing) for
stuff like font-locking, navigation, folding, etc. Of course, you can
hook external binaries into Semantic pretty easily, but I can understand
Dmitry that if he does not need the rest of Semantic, why should he
bother?

Now, I think having AST information in your buffer is great, and I don't
like depending on external binaries if I don't have to, because I want
as much as possible in Emacs Lisp. For me, that's what Emacs is about
and why I still use it in the first place.

-David