Nicolas,
 
Why should we switch? In fact, Tuareg or ocaml-mode provides reasonable
IDE based on emacs. 
And those IDEs are much betters then those broken VC++. Really. 
In fact, I’m industry Java programmer and use emacs JDE mode with
ClearCase integration to develop out OSS product. This IDE is better
integrated into our development process than so called industry-strength
IDEs, such as IDEA and Together/J. 
 
I think, emacs provides good framework for building such standard IDE,
and all things, you mentioned, could be easily implemented in it.
 
Alex
 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Nicolas Cannasse [mailto:warplayer@free.fr] 
Sent: Wednesday, March 12, 2003 5:32 AM
To: Guillaume Marceau; caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] OCaml popularity
 
> One other unrelated observation on language acceptance: 
> 
> In the the industry, they accept new languages as their IDE become 
> usable. Somehow, a solid IDE has become the sign that the language 
> matured and is now stable enough for industrial usage. Also, by their 
> own account, industrial coders spent so much time in VC++, they are
now 
> IDE-dependent. IDE in this context means one-key compilation,
hypertext 
> jumps between name usages and definitions, and a tree overview of the 
> components of the project, context sensitive work completion and
context 
> sensitive help, etc. Ocaml would gain at having an official IDE
project 
> which implement these features. 
You're raising here a remanent subject :) 
This had been in my mind (and also in the mind of several other people
of 
this list I think) since I started with OCaml. Right now, as one of the
few 
ocaml-windows developpers, I'm editing and compiling Ocaml under Visual 
Studio 6. The language is not fully integrated since VC6 does not enable
it 
( while .Net can do it, but is far more expensive and more difficult to 
deploy for a single basic user ). There is the workspace, syntax 
highlightning, automatic compilation, one-key compilation start and 
compilation-error-jump-to-file+line. So it is right now quite convenient
to 
work with. 
An IDE will require a far more level of integration such as the
possibility 
to "debug" types visualy when having an error ( e.g. just put your mouse
/ 
cursor on a variable to see its type ) , perhaps an integrated debugger
, 
and of course a multiplatform (unix+windows) GUI since doing it from 
unix-only won't help people from the industry and doing it for windows
only 
won't help the large part of the ocaml community. 
The problem here is that such kind of editor is more or less a personnal

choice, and if you want the current OCaml+Emacs users to switch to such
an 
IDE, you'll have to make it fully customizable and add key features that

will make the difference. Quite a challenge. 
Nicolas Cannasse 
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