Re: IDE

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 10/20/2015 04:03 AM, Eric Ludlam wrote:

> We should poke at this.  Can you share a little about what your tool
> does?  Then perhaps we hypothesize about the efficacy of integrating
> into CEDET as an example of integrating external tools.

It probably wouldn't gain too much from CEDET integration.

It has:

- Server, serving JSON over HTTP, with a RPC-like protocol.

- Emacs client in the shape of a minor mode. It defines a 
completion-at-point-functions element and a keymap with essentially 
three commands: "jump to the definition", "jump back", "show 
documentation for the method at point".

- To determine the current context (which would be similar to "current 
tag" in Semantic), it calls ruby-add-log-current-method and parses the 
returned string. I've improved that function in ruby-mode a year or two 
ago, and it's pretty accurate.

Robe is also pretty hacky compared to most other similar tools:

- The server loads itself into and runs from an REPL buffer. We either 
expect the user to already have such a REPL running (with the project 
loaded), or offer to launch one automatically (which fails in certain 
configurations).

- It doesn't support multiple projects in the same Emacs session.

- It misses some trivial opportunities to infer the type of a local 
variable. That would be my first priority to work on... when I deal with 
all that project and xref stuff in the core, I guess.

Lives here: https://github.com/dgutov/robe/