so adding a comma at the end of an Enum could either be a 5 second task or a 5 hours one - which is the main problem with messing about with the bnf - one tiny change can cause tons of other stuff to break
but only some enums. I'm trying to figure out exactly what the cause is.
Actually looking again addall isn't practical due to getIdentifier being called.
However I still think it should be refactored
in many places you have to follow the pattern that the IntelliJ code forces on you - and that really sucks as you have to extend from certain classes etc so it really reduces the freedom to write clean elegant code - which is a big part of why I stopped working on the plugin
There is not much activity on the plugin - I ran out of time and haven't really done anything much for over a year
if there were clearer docs on how various parts of the plugin architecture is supposed to work and be coded - then things would be much easier - but the docs suck unfortunatley
I think the last thing I helped with was the move to gradle - but only really because Russel Winder said he would love to start working on the plugin in Kotlin - but then he was unable to contribute
I'm not particularly keen on Kotlin either to be honest - I assumed it would more like Scala than Java - but it's totally not
So I think that my next pr will be all bug fixes. I hope that the bnf will be reliable enough to implement safe delete, inspections and better references
but in general I find they don't work at all well with intellij
do you know Scala?
previously in Java I was using the totally_lazy java project to get that stuff
but having access to map, flatMap, filter, etc would allow a lot of clean up in some areas of the existing code
Maps and filter etc. could definitely be helpful.
Kotlin has some of those functional constructs as well
I couldn't get all the different types of comments working in the lexer
I've tagged v1.12 for release to plugin repo (intellij 2017.* versions only) https://github.com/kingsleyh/DLanguage/releases
Are there some small projects I could get stuck into here to help progress things?
alternatively you could look into BNF recover rules to get a more robust poster, which highlights errors where they are, instead of long before the syntax error
Is there some "low hanging fruit" stuff that I can stuck into, and can get others to get stuck into. With DConf 2017 now over, we need to strike to get resource into this project to help move it along faster. I certainly want to get the plugin working in CLion as well as IntelliJ IDEA, but that means CMake not Dub. I am going to suss out CMake_D and see what the LDC build is doing.
it's a good idea to start by getting familiar with the Intellij API, maybe getting a little plugin project running from scratch and looking through example code from other plugins such as intellij-rust and https://github.com/JetBrains/intellij-community/tree/master/plugins
I've found that as a general rule there is no such thing as quick and easy when trying to get a new feature working within intellij. I've put in hours of work into local branches that ended up going nowhere.
do you have any experience with BNF grammar / JFlex?
I have not used JFlex, but many, many, many moons ago I was fairly proficient at lex and yacc, later flex and bison. BNF grammars are not usually though LALR(1). I'll take a look at the JetBrains documentation. I might also talk to the CLion folk about making a plugin workable with both IntelliJ and CLion.
It should be possible to support both dub and cmake as well as all jetbrains products - just prepare for endless hours of frustration and trial and error - and don't be surprised if there are no docs or incorrect docs. I love using IntelliJ but the internals and plugin development are horrible!