On 2016-08-30 08:51 AM, Thomas Martitz wrote:

Am 30.08.2016 um 01:53 schrieb Matthew Brush:

On 2016-08-29 03:17 PM, Thomas Martitz wrote:

Am 29.08.2016 um 17:05 schrieb Jiří Techet:

[...]

There is also another aspect about the proposal that worries me: a
plugin shall provide N features for M languages. And X plugins might be
compete (not even considering the desire that plugins can build upon
each other). This means (slightly exaggerated) that N*M*X possibilities
have to be managed by Geany's conflict resolution. I don't want to
implement that. It seems much simpler to me to collect tags from
plugins, merge them (maybe throw out duplicates) and pass them to the
actual feature code all within Geany.

In principle it's not that hard to manage, as mentioned in my
"Proposed Design" message, Geany just needs to keep the providers in a
list and the callbacks work like GTK/GDK callbacks (and some in Geany)
where the callback's return value determines whether the next provider
is called or not. In that message I attached a mockup of a kind of UI
that could be used to allow users absolute control, and for Geany it's
just a (set of) ordered lists.

You say this should be easy, I say I expect it to be complicated. This
is quite the same (just the other way around) with my suggestion to just
pass tags to Geany. There you keep claiming that it'll be a massive
change why I expect it to be relatively easy to do. At least not harder
than changing 6+ core parts in Geany to execute plugin callbacks and
make something useful from the results.

I've tinkered with implementations, it's generally as easy as walking a list in a loop, calling a function and breaking early if the function returns `FALSE`.

I don't think I claimed it will be a massive change, I think I just said it will add more complexity to ft-plugins, as opposed to less, as you claimed.

Since the very first response I made to you about TM, I've been open to the idea. I raised a few concerns which you never responded to, namely that it may not be possible for TM to handle all the tags in Clang's AST (it has a very rich and complex AST, heavily optimized by some of the smartest people in the C++ world). Also the AST is HUGE and representing it twice in memory would at least (if not more than) double the memory footprint.

What worries me is that we jumped from mere brainstorming to a
relatively concrete proposal, without evaluating requirements or any
other research. Or was this evaluation just invisible to me?

I evaluated and experimented with several different approaches and
discussed various details with some of the main developers (including
you) on IRC. Based on the way that in my opinion, as someone who has
tried and failed to implement the needed features in the past, and as
a Geany developer, I recommended a proposed design for further input.
And here we are :)

Please show me the point in the IRC logs where I agreed with your
approach. In fact, I can't remember discussing ft-plugins with you on
IRC at all (I just asked at one point how libclang works in more detail).

I never said I proposed a design on IRC, that's what the "Proposed Design" email was about. I discussed approaches and details with some of the developers. You and I talked about whether TM might be up to the job of representing scope, for example (and you pointed out that it can, crudely, by using strings rather than parent/child relationships).

Your evaluation is still invisible to me.

I evaluated the various approaches myself and by discussing specific topics with some devs lately and previously when we talked about ft-plugins so that I would be able to propose a design on the mailing list, and here we are discussing that. I don't see the problem.

As I asked in an earlier message, I'd be interested if you could
provide some more concrete examples of what you were thinking with
using TM, which would accomplish the goals mentioned in the Github
Issue and fleshed-out more in the top of this thread.

Essentially I'd propose a signal that's emitted when Geany begins
(re-)parsing a file (I believe it does this after each keystroke, after
a debouncing timeout). Plugins could connect to that signal, perhaps
parse the file again, using their special, language specific library
code, and pass the tags they've got to Geany using a to-be-designed API
function (probably involving TMTag and TMSourceFile). Alternatively, the
plugin signal handlers could run before Geany's own one, potentially
blocking Geany from parsing the file at all. Or both approaches.

Unrelated to whether to use TM or not, I think you're right that a hook to tell ft-plugins to re-parse would be useful, otherwise plugins will all have to implement that logic/signal connections themselves.

Geany would then merge the tags, perhaps giving the plugin ones more
weight, and store it in TM.

I think you underestimate how many tags we're talking here. The example libclang ft-plugin would have to re-walk the entire AST (which is absolutely massive, particularly for C++), convert it to TM tag structures, and then Geany/TM would have to perform some merging logic, would would be more complicated than now if it was to support C++ properly, every single re-parse. My intuition tells me that just won't be fast enough, Clang already jumps through hoops and uses tricks to just build its own AST in-time.