Comment by narag
11 years ago
Callgraphs, searching for references etc would still need to be recalculated by the code indexer.
The what? Sorry, I really don't know what you're talking about. If you want to introduce a reference, logical thing to do is checking it in the same moment.
The only advantage is - no parsing step.
There are many more, see my other reply to icebraining.
About tools, you seem to give more importance to diff than to write programs with a more powerful environment. I can't agree. Also I don't think creating a suitable diff for trees is a hard problem. I just need to convince Linus of the idea and he will write one in a couple of days :-)
Oh, my bad, so you write references into the sourcefiles - smart. Your code isn't a tree anymore, but a graph, but other than that it will work.
Of course you still need code indexers for reverse lookups. You can't write "I am called from a,b,c,..." to source files because printf would be several gigabytes and growing each second:) So you still need code indexer to look up the code graphs in your workspace and build the index where this is called from.
Regarding the diff/merge tooling - IMHO it's much more important than powerful editor. If my company forced me to write code in mcedit I could live with that. I would quit straight away if we had no version control, no matter the IDE we would use. I worked for a short time in oracle forms and I won't do that again.
Re: merging of trees - you keep references in the trees so it's not a tree anymore, but graph possibly with cycles - makes it even harder to merge them properly (and you can't do unsafe merges because people won't fix them if it's binary format).
you keep references in the trees so it's not a tree anymore, but graph possibly with cycles
Cycles, why? Tree+links can be treated as a tree visually.
Edit: Oh, I see what you meant with indexer. That information would be in memory. In the database it's stored in just one direction. When loaded it expands bidirectionally.
Visualy it's not a problem. But now you need to maintain the links at all times. So all the operations must be aware of the whole program calltree. I think this could cause problems, especially when linking across libraries boundary, doing dependency injection, reflection etc, but I may be wrong.
Would like to see it implemented out of curiosity. My mine problem with merging trees could be solved by @pshc idea so maybe it could work?