Re: [anjuta-devel] Code assistance plugin

[Abderrahim Kitouni <a kitouni gmail com>]

Hi Sébastien, all,

I may be slightly late, but here are my thoughts anyway.

              في خ، 12-04-2012 عند 23:06 +0200 ، كتب Sébastien Granjoux:
> Hi all,
>
>
> There are some work planned to use clang to improve code assistance in 
> Anjuta. There is a gedit plugin written in Vala which is already doing 
> it. But it's not clear for me what has to be done and how to do it.

I also think this needs to be discussed.

> 1. The gedit plugin is written in Vala. Do we plan to add Vala code in 
> Anjuta or do we have to rewrite it in C?

Anjuta already has some Vala code (the Vala plugin), so I don't think
this should be a problem.

> 2. This is a gedit plugin, it cannot be loaded in Anjuta. Do you think 
> it's better to rewrite it or check if we can load gedit plugin?

Anjuta and gedit expose different interfaces (for example, Anjuta
doesn't expose GtkSourceView directly), so I don't think it's worth the
trouble to try loading a gedit plugin.

> 3. After a quick look at the code I think the plugin is already split in 
> 3 libraries:
> * libgcp is the common part, including the GUI working with GEdit.
> * libgcpbackendc is the C backend using clang. It is a GEdit plugin and 
> depends on libgcp too.
> * gcpbackendpython is the python backend. It is a GEdit plugin and 
> depends on libgcp too.
> How do we plan to remove the dependency with GEdit?

I don't know. My understanding is that we want to use libclang the same
way as we use the libvala in the Vala plugin (or perhaps a little more).

> 4. Which features do we plan to add?
> * Auto completion.
> * List symbols
> * Searching symbols
> * Renaming symbols
> * Parameter reordering.
> * Background compiling and reporting errors while editing the file.
> * Display call graph
> * Static analysis

Just a personal opinion, but I think auto completion and background
compilation are the first things to do, then adding refactoring
(renaming symbols and reordering parameters, and maybe something else)
would be useful as well.

> 5. Several features (auto completion (in C and python), symbol list) 
> already exist in Anjuta. Do we keep them or is it planned to replace them?

I don't know about python (but I think the current plugin uses rope,
while gedit's uses the ast module), but for C I think using an actual
compiler would give better results than we have now.

> 6. Comparing to anjuta-tags for C, I think clang is much better but 
> anjuta-tags works for much more languages. Moreover an important part of 
> the symbol-db plugin is the database management which is not existing in 
> the gedit plugin. I would prefer to keep it. Is it planned?

I think that using clang means making the C plugin do more or less the
same thing as is currently done in the Vala plugin: by using a real
compiler, we can have a better understanding of the code and thus get
better results for the completion. I think symbol-db could still be
useful for other languages (the javascript plugin as also using it) and
for the symbol list.

Cheers,
Abderrahim