Re: IDE

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 10/27/2015 12:09 AM, Óscar Fuentes wrote:

> > And the subject of this thread is "IDE". Modern IDEs do know stuff.
>
> I was addressing the specific sub-topic about TAGS.

That subtopic started exactly with complaint that TAGS only allow for 
"jump to definition". Then someone argued that no, you can store 
anything what you like in them, we discussed that a bit, and here you've 
come to repeat the beginning: "For references, TAGS is of little help".

> For knowing stuff you need tools which are as sophisticated as the
> language they are working with, and there is no medium term solution for
> that requirement as far as Emacs core is concerned on the C++ realm,
> probably Java as well.

There can be some middle ground. From what I've seen of GNU Global 
(admittedly not too much), it's better for both "find definitions" and 
"find references" than TAGS.

Even in C++ and Java it's not too hard to implement a reasonably 
accurate parser that will index definitions. Recognizing references 
accurately is more of a problem (for now we indeed use Grep or similar 
tools).

> There are external Emacs packages that are on
> track for solving this problem, and an increasing number of features are
> being implemented around those external packages.

What Emacs can do is provide a common interface those external packages 
to hook into. Like progmodes/xref.el, for example.

> That makes this
> discussion about IDEs on Emacs core to look like idle chatting.

It is idle chatting, for the most part. No discussions of the code in 
Emacs master, no patches, etc.