[MLton] Survey results, IDE

Andrei de A. Formiga archimedes_siracusa@yahoo.com
Tue, 1 Mar 2005 10:07:51 -0800 (PST)


--- Alexandre <Xlex0x835@rambler.ru> wrote:

> And another one (yes, I know I might be annoying),
> about IDE. I use 
> Eclipse now (for the PHP development) and explore
> available languages 
> plug-ins list, and there are OCaml, Haskell, but no
> SML... That's 
> really pity, not because I need that IDE now (I
> don't), but because 
> that's additional advertising of the project, that's
> minus one 
> threshold for the new users, that's really important
> in my point of 
> view...

   Making a SML feature for Eclipse wouldn't be hard,
just a lot of work. The OCaml and Haskell plugins
already share code, and to add SML to the mix would be
easy. The main question is how to integrate the
incremental building nature of Eclipse with current
SML tools; not that there aren't ways of doing that,
but that are many. Mlton couldn't be used for
incremental building, of course, being a whole-program
compiler. But it could be used to generate the final
version of the program. The plugin would probably have
to manage the differences between SML/NJ and MLton,
which is more work. And we would need a good SML
parser that could talk to the Java code, to generate
the AST for editor/refactoring/etc. All doable, but
creating an eclipse plugin is a lot of (mostly dull)
work indeed.

---
[]s, Andrei Formiga




		
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