Skip to main content
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index] [List Home]
Re: [ide-dev] A story of Handly and MelnormeEclipse


On 11 March 2016 at 10:30, Mickael Istria <mistria@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 03/11/2016 11:13 AM, Vladimir Piskarev wrote:
I'd rather keep Handly separate for the time being, with perhaps moving parts of it down to the Eclipse Platform (LTK?) eventually. I believe that it is not necessary to be part of another project to be used by it, right? :-) I mean that DLTK could depend on Handly, not the other way around. (Handly is really much more generic while being much narrower in scope.)
 In theory yes, in practice, there are other things to consider than just code:
* Handly is currently a small and young project: very few contributors, not much community... Those are things that need to tremendously grow to consider Platform or DLTK relying on Handly. Indeed, adopting an upstream project as a dependency is a critical strategic choice, so it requires real sustainability to be considered. However, in the other way round, if Handly gets part of DLTK, then it will immediately get a boost of contributors and/or users, and be perceived as more "reliable" by other projects such as JDT, CDT, JSDT, PDT...

DLTK relying on Handly could have been a good thing, but I don't think Handly itself should be *part of* the DLTK project. Handly has a much more specific and narrower scope than DLTK (which I think is good thing). (Indeed, there's more than one thing in the JDT-clones that could have broken down into separate, relatively isolated libraries/components.)

But more importantly, unfortunately from what I see the development of DLTK has slowed down considerably, it seems to be in just maintenance mode for some time now - just keeping up with Platform releases, and minor bugfixes. (https://github.com/eclipse/dltk.core/graphs/contributors)
I'm basing that comment in my experience, I was actually an early adopter of DLTK: the DDT IDE I've been developing was based on DLTK from about 2011 or so, not too long after DLTK was out. By 2013 the development stagnated, and by that same time I started refactoring out more and more IDE-generic code to what would later become MelnormeEclipse (initially called LangEclipseIDE - indeed it was announced on this list under that name). By early 2014, DDT no longer depended on DLTK, and I haven't looked back (even before 2013 the experience with DLTK API was often frustrating!).

The only kinda IDE-generic-tools project that is under active development is XText, so if anything, for Handly I think it might make more sense to try to get it adopted there.

--

Back to the top