[Geany-Devel] [FT-plugins] Proposed "Features"

[Lex Trotman]

On 29 August 2016 at 22:38, Thomas Martitz <kugel at rockbox.org> wrote:
> Am 29.08.2016 um 14:23 schrieb Lex Trotman:
>>
>> This adds per use case hooks to plugins, which then became part of the
>> stable API. I don't think that we have to codify every single use case of
>> tags into the plugins. That's just making it harder (maybe impossible?) to
>> change or add use cases.
>> The point of this proposal is to change and add use-cases that are not
>> currently possible with the current plugin API.  But instead of each
>> use-case generating its own piece of API and its own infrastructure,
>> the point of the FT-plugins proposal is to provide a common
>> infrastructure and approach for all filetype specific use-cases, those
>> needed for currently suggested uses, indentation, clang based styling
>> and symbols, and as framework for future use-cases we either havn't
>> thought of, or havn't a concrete intention to add immediately.
>>
>>> I thought we agreed that plugin should simply provide tags to Geany/TM
>>
>> This proposal is about many types of filetype specific functionality,
>> not just tags.  Tagmanager will not help in any way with indenting
>> Haskell, or even C++.
>>
>
>
> 4 of 5 of the proposed features are strictly tag-related. And Geany can do
> all of them already, it's just that the current implementation leaves things
> to be desired so there is the idea to let plugins improve upon them.

Well, 3 out of 6 but whos counting :)

Certainly 1) showing symbols in the symbol list, 2) autocomplete and
3) calltips are currently available to a degree in Geany.  But
highlighting, build commands and build result handling are not.  But
to be able to do 2) and 3) accurately needs more knowledge of each
language semantics than is currently available in Geany or tagmanager.

>
> I disagree with the proposed solution for those 4, because they are
> offloading logic on a per feature basis to plugins, only because Geany isn't
> capable at the moment. If Geany was capable, then there could be 1 solution
> for the 4 features and less complexity in each plugin (and we know the
> quality of plugins varies a lot so they should have little complexity as
> possible).

Encoding the knowledge of language semantics into Geany, for each
language supported, is going to make autocomplete and calltip code
look like c.c. Its not the way to go.


>
> The solution I have in mind simply allows plugins to pass tags to Geany
> which they parsed with more advanced code. The tags itself would advanced
> too, to allow for the improvements current TM+ctags can't offer. Symbol
> tree, calltips, autocompletion, jump-to-decl can all be improved based on
> the advanced tags.

Well, again you are encoding language semantics into Geany, for
example for C++ that means autocompletion and calltips need to handle
1) local symbol scopes, 2) member functions being in the scope of the
class, even when they are not 3) argument dependent lookup 4) template
expansion lookup and 5) handling of template parameter based typing.
These are hard, just ask the GCC and clang guys.  And every user of
Geany will have to pay the cost of the code they don't use, unless
they use C++.

Then for a multidispatch language like Julia you need to handle
overloading in an even more subtle way than C++ overloading.

And why re-implement these language specific subtle and difficult
features in Geany when more and more languages are providing libclang
like libraries to do it for us, accurately and up to date with the
language.

Cheers
Lex

>
>
> Best regards.
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