Issue with KDevelop: Is it using different parsers in parallell for different puropuses?

[Erik Sigra]

On 14.08.06 13:30:19, Erik Sigra wrote:

> 1. We don't really like HTML mails here.

Sorry, I am away from my computer/connection and have to use the this crappy webmail, which defaults to HTML mail. Will try to do better.


> 2. kate is an editor it's not part of kdevelop and the kdevelop
> developers have only partial influence on what the kate developers use
> for parsing files.

Kate is part of KDevelop when I am using KDevelop (although I have read that it is possible to use other editors in KDevelop. KDevelop users have enough influence on the Katepart to turn off it's syntax parsing if it becomes redundant because KDevelop can do it better.


> 3. Kate probably doesn't need all the extra information ANTLR has

I am not so sure about that. I have seen suboptimal highlighting/folding/indenting/linewrapping because Kate's primitive parsers do not understand the languages well enough.


> parsing for highlighting and such things needs to be very fast.

I estimate that using an ANTLR-generated parser for highlighting will be faster than using a parser, with the same level of code understanding, defined in XML. I wonder wether it would be possible at all for KDevelop to highlight the code on it's own, performance not considered, instead of using Kate's highlighter.


> Much faster than parsing to build a tree of classes/methods, code completion
> or anything else.

I think code completion also has to be fast, because it is supposed to work as you type, just like highlighting.


> 4. Kate supports much more languages than kdevelop does (for parsing matter)

Good. Just keep using Kates XML-defined parsers for the languages that do not have ANTLR parsers.


> the support for new languages doesn't always come from the
> developers themselves. Thus the people writing parsers for kate do not
> necessarily know antlr or what a language grammar is.

I would rather not use a parser written by someone who does not even know what a language grammar is. I am afraid it would just be too shoddy.


> If you think kate should use an antlr parser please write to
> kwrite-devel and start the discussion there.

I was not thingking along those lines. For the time being I just wanted to know if the more advanced parsers that KDevelop already has could take over some tasks that the Katepart does, and do them better.

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