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Re: [ide-dev] The LangEclipseIDE project


On 07/03/2015 06:35 PM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
> "Do you have any plans to provide programming language independent UI components"

Yes, in fact that is the main focus of LangEclipseIDE at the moment. However, being currently a one-man project, it's not as feature-full as JDT, nor will it be any time soon. But it's not too shabby either. This section has an overview of what UI functionality/components it currently provides: https://github.com/bruno-medeiros/LangEclipseIDE/blob/master/README-LangEclipseIDE.md#functionality
Ok, great to hear. I'll have a look if there is something we could use.

So yeah, for example: content assist, code snippets ("Templates" in JDT lingo), preference pages for all that, outline and quick-outline (no hierarchical outline support though).

However, no Junit view, nor package explorer support. Well not for displaying Java-like flat packages at least, but there is some support for other Project Explorer extensions: stuff like project dependencies and (in an upcoming version) build targets. I dunno how well that applies to Scala though.

No code folding support either (DDT has that functionality, but it's crappy code copied from DLTK that hasn't yet been cleaned-up/refactored, and put into LangEclipseIDE).

One interesting thing that LangEclipseIDE has, that doesn't come from JDT or JDT-like IDEs, is functionality to help you integrate external, command-line tools to provide IDE functionality. For example in Goclipse, the outline is provided by an external parser (updated on the fly as the user types in the editor). Again dunno if that would apply well to Scala.
Calling command line tools is not necessary in Scala IDE, since all the tools are already written in Scala and therefore can simply added as a library to the IDE.

Sidenote: Funny enough, unlike JDT, the Goclipse outline is updated almost instantly as the user types, because there is no artificial delay to start the reconciler (I dunno why that delay is in JDT in the first place). Not that it matter much anyways - personally I haven't used the Outline view in ages, Quick-Outline is much more handy.
We use the reconciliation time because the Scala compiler is slow as hell and takes enormous resources during compilation. It can't be aborted during compilation of a single file either. Therefore, calling it on every keystroke would more or less be impossible.

Given that the Scala compiler is so slow a lot of APIs can't be used or make some features difficult to implement. Code completion for example can take some seconds before completion. Because the JDT API just takes a list of completions we have to block users until the compiler is finished. If the API would take a potentially infinite stream of completions, we wouldn't have to block but could show new completions once they appear. This forces us more or less to re-implement all APIs in a non-blocking/reactive way and makes it more difficult to use work from others because for most languages one does not need to think about the compiler being to slow.

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On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 3:06 PM, Simon Schäfer <mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Scala IDE dev here. A few years ago I would have welcomed such a project, nowadays I lost faith in the Eclipse platform. There are too many internal issues and limitations that make using the eclipse.core and especially the jdt.core API a pain. This means that over the years we reduced dependencies to these APIs as much as possible and replaced them with our own implementations.

We still depend on JDT because that is how we started and while our core is ready in moving away from JDT our UI is not. JDT provides some useful stuff like the package explorer, the outline view, the junit integration etc. and we don't have the resources to replace them by ourselves. Do you have any plans to provide programming language independent UI components? This could make your project useful to us, for core API we probably don't have a need anymore.


On 07/03/2015 03:34 PM, Bruno Medeiros wrote:
Hi guys. Doug pointed me to this mailing list, so I wanted to let you know about a project I've been working on: LangEclipseIDE.

LangEclipseIDE is a framework/library for building language IDEs on top of Eclipse. It aims to provide common functionality that is present in IDEs like JDT or CDT but is not refactored out into an externally reusable component. So the aim here is similar to DLTK, but the overall design is different in some ways (even though we reuse bits of code from JDT and DLTK).

https://github.com/bruno-medeiros/LangEclipseIDE/blob/master/README-LangEclipseIDE.md

LangEclipseIDE is currently used by 3 IDEs: DDT, RustDT, and Goclipse. It's still a young project so there is much more that could be done. It would be nice to get some collaboration going with other IDE projects as there is a lot of potential for that.


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