And there was Eclipse, the new and shiny Java-based development plarform. Eclipse is the new fashion when it comes to develop custom IDEs for any freaking language available out there. With the Plug-in Development Environment (PDE) you can transform Eclipse to be whatever you want.
Truth is that I really like Eclipse, well, at least until you have to really do something quite deep or quite different. When your stuff is weird, you really have to replace (recode) large parts of the framework to get your functionality.
Documentation is abundent, but as soon as you need some deeper stuff, you're stuck with the JDT code.
There are a lot of articles and how-tos out there on how to support your language in Eclipse, but they only handle very tiny languages.
Oh, and don't let me tell you about the slowness... Yes... is slow. That of couse if you don't do profiling and
tune your code to the max.
Even slow and with a lot of problems, Eclipse is getting better and better. And well, it seems the only open-source platform out there that worths your while.
As an approximation... I would say you need about one year to build a good development platform that supports your language. That, of course if you have a good programmer. The idea is to go in small pieces and
make something available as soon as you have something:
- editor for your language with syntax highlighting
- outline for your language
- content assistance for your language (code completion, hovering, etc)
- perspective for your language
- debugging for your language
And, really, really check those plugin.xml files when something never works or stops working...
It might save you A LOT OF TIME :)
The main development of Modelica Development Tooling (MDT) - a plugin for the Modelica language based on OpenModelica - was quite straightforward, but it took a lot of time to tune the details.
Cheers,
za-k/
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