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Re: [cdt-dev] RE: ObjectiveC

On Tue, Feb 24, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Schaefer, Doug
<Doug.Schaefer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> The vision I've always had and I'm not sure how well we executed on, would
> be that people could easily extend the CDT with a new language without
> having to adjust the CDT.

That would be good, if it were possible. I don't think it's far off
though, either.

>There are minor things like the linkage type enum that needs to be in the CDT proper ...

Does this even need to be a compile-time constant? After all, you
already know the (presumably unique) String ID. Why not persist an
auto-id key along with the string at the beginning of the persisted
data structure? Presumably, it was to save persisted space, but an
int-to-string map header would allow you to do both as well as
allowing these to be dynamically added in the future. When adding, it
could consult the on-disk table map and assign the next-plus-one id to
the entry and use that for that install. It might mean that my
workspace has a different concept of the IDs than yours does (if I
install Obj-C first, then fortran whilst you install fortran then
Obj-C) but these aren't shared anyway, right? If there are shared
pre-generated DOMs, these could have their own mapping table defined
which could get re-mapped upon merging with an already on disk format.
At least, conceptually, if not practically ...

> Part of my hesitation on this topic was whether new languages should be part
> of the CDT or be their own project. I'm starting to learn that keeping them
> separate isn't necessarily helping them or us.

I think there's advantages and disadvantages. For one thing, sometimes
it's easier to put things together externally. There's also exploring
what else needs to be done to make it extendable so that CDT isn't a
collection of everything but a starting point for others to build on.
I don't necessarily think I know what the right answer should be in
this case either.

> That said, if the increment is fairly minor to support Objective-C, which is
> very C-like, then maybe it makes the most sense having it directly in the
> CDT. And as the contribution becomes significant, Alex, we could nominate
> you as a CDT committer.

If it ever gets to that stage, great :-) But I don't think I'm there
yet, nor is the project. But actually, it's really difficult (in a non
DVCS world, at least) to keep contributing changes and somewhat of an
impediment to contributing generally.

> To be honest, I haven't looked at language extensibility in a while and need
> to refresh my memory as to what's there. I've been cheering Alex on in the
> blogosphere, and given how quickly he's gotten into the issues he needs to
> address, it's probably a good time for me to dive in.

By the way, I'm making some progress, but I'm more exploring than
doing at the moment. I'm not that far ahead on the process yet, and
expect updates leading up to EclipseCon somewhat slow ;-)

Alex


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