Re: IDE versus emacs

[Tom]

Philipp Haselwarter <philipp <at> haselwarter.org> writes:
> >
> > The Eclipse developers should be persuaded somehow to separate
> > the completion/refactoring stuff into a separate library. Is 
> > there a reason why this part is tied to their GUI editor? If it
> > were a separate library then any editor could use it, not just 
> > Eclipse.
> 
> That would be Eclipse headless. Check out eclim.
> 

Yes, Eclim is a good workaround, but it's not the same thing
as having a separate library in the official Eclipse tree. As far as I
know Eclim supports only a subset of Eclipse features. If the
completing/refactoring part were officially an independent 
part of Eclipse then its interface would support all available
features (because the Eclipse IDE would also use this interface),
so it would only be the matter of creating an Emacs interface to
have all the features available in Emacs.

Currently, eclim is an outside effort to gain access to Eclipse
features, therefore it lags behind Eclipse and does not support
all features, probably because of lack of resources which would
not be a problem if separating the language intelligence part
was done within the Eclipse project itself in the first place.