Re: [anjuta-devel] How to get the type of member that is a pointer using symbol-db

[Marco Diego Aurélio Mesquita <marcodiegomesquita gmail com>]

On Tue, Jul 30, 2013 at 7:53 PM, Massimo Cora' <maxcvs email it> wrote:
> 4. Other languages than C/C++. Well, is it worth keeping the old fashioned
> ctags to have a really tiny support for some symbols here and there in the
> source files? IMHO we have to take a decision here. We should have some
> numbers on how many people uses Anjuta and for what languages. Python and
> Javascript for instance have their compilers installed into Anjuta. Why
> don't we let them provide the symbols given a common-interface?

This "common-interface" is the magic I'd like to see. I think we can
give a good step in that direction if we specify such interface. Since
ever we have had compilers, but there has never been a good
language-agnostic standard to, given source code, list the symbols
declaration and usage.

I dream of a day where we can simply type "gcc
--list-symbols-decl-and-use source.c" and have it to parse and
automatically generate a good (better than ctags) output of the
symbols declaration and usage of that source file. If we specify an
interface that is simple enough, it would not be too hard to implement
it in other compilers/languages. Imagine how great it would be to have
it working for each gcc-supported language. Imagine how great it would
be to have it working for some non-gcc-supported languages too (vala,
java, javascript, python...).

I propose we should discuss such an interface (file format and API).
This is something I've been dreaming of for a long time but always
thought it was only me. I think we can make a bit of history with such
an specification.