Re: IDE

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 10/12/2015 02:05 PM, Oleh Krehel wrote:

> I like the first style a lot more. The second looks a lot like the ugly
> mess of Eclipse.

I agree, the Microsoft IDE looks slicker here, but the examples are 
basically the same, in that they use separate frames for the completion 
list and documentation, not the same one.

Eclipse uses a combined one, last I checked.

> The first part is just Emacs' style of doing things: we usually enter
> stuff in the minibuffer, so it makes sense for completion to display

A lot of users are fine with that, but I think we should do better.

Ivy also could use a popup to display completions, in the future. 
Ideally, I'd prefer something like Sublime/Atom popup at the top of the 
screen that you get after pressing C-p.

> there.  The second part is arguably unnecessary: I usually just jump to
> definition of symbol rather than look at the docstring inline.

You'd think so, but displaying the docstring automatically, like 
Auto-Complete does (as well as certain IDEs), has been a common request 
for a while. And now, https://github.com/expez/company-quickhelp is 
pretty popular.

> CEDET is usable, but it can't be as fast and as precise as
> GCC. Add to that that the language standard is updated every 5 years or
> so with new syntax. GCC has the people to update the parser
> accordingly. Doing so for CEDET would be a duplication of effort, and we
> don't have the people to do it anyway.

Agree.

> Could someone explain to me if making GCC the dependency of Emacs would
> be a good idea, from technical and freedom point of view?  Personally, I
> wouldn't care if Emacs executable would get inflated a bit more, if that
> meant access to true IDE features, which are only possible with a
> precise and fast parser.

Having the whole GCC as a dependency might be problematic, but that's 
not the #1 problem. AFAIK, GCC currently has no "code completion" 
feature anywhere.