Re: [Caml-list] What does Jane Street use/want for an IDE? What about you?

[Jon Harrop <jonathandeanharrop@googlemail.com>]

On Monday 20 October 2008 14:19:40 Kuba Ober wrote:
> what do you guys use for your development environment?

I use Emacs but I hate it.

> What would be the minimal set of functionality that would make you happy for
> an IDE?

. Written in OCaml using OCaml's own lexer and parser to save effort and make 
it possible for others to help develop it without losing their hair.

. A proper GUI (where options can be set using the mouse).

. Mainstream key bindings, e.g. CTRL+S for save.

. Jump to definition.

. Graphical throwback of the type of the subexpression under the mouse pointer 
or in the current selection.

. Graphical throwback of the documentation related to what is under the mouse 
pointer.

. Graphical throwback of errors and, in the case of type errors, optional 
highlighting of previous unification points.

. Refactoring, e.g. changing the name of a definition in all occurrences.

. Autocompletion that handles structural types in LablGTK code and operators, 
i.e. when the user types "+" present options for int "+", float "+.", 
num "+/" and any other operators that begin with "+".

. Represent an OCaml project as a tree of modules that happen to have the 
first level stored as files.

. Performant enough to handle projects with hundreds of thousands of lines of 
code.

. Parallel so seven of my cores aren't idle while I'm waiting.

. The ability to hide the tail of +., +/ etc. operators to make numerical code 
more readable.

> What are killer features you dream of?

Only one: an interactive top-level where output is presented via graphical 
elements (e.g. a scene graph) and is no longer limited to just ASCII text. 
This would give OCaml the graphical capabilities of Mathematica's 
awesome "notebook" front-end.

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e