Re: [Caml-list] [Q] How to use merlin with mikmatch_str ?

[Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>]

Merlin solves the harder problem of incremental type-checking: if you
make a small modification to your code buffer, it will compute the
difference between the previous and the current state and try to only
re-{parse,typecheck} this.
This approach is elegant and, in the long run, necessary to guarantee
the fluidity necessary for interactive usage (although in practice
compilation is fast enough that you might be able to make do with a
batch re-checking fallback in many scenarios).

Currently Merlin breaks the abstraction of the OCaml parser and
type-checker, to turns them into incremental-aware tools; but Merlin
authors are trying to get their changes upstream as much as possible.

This also means that the world of supported syntaxes is closed, it
cannot be extended with arbitrary syntax extensions if they were
designed to support batch preprocessing only, with no interface to use
them incrementally. (But merlin authors have implemented support for
some common extensions in their incremental parser.)

On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 3:48 PM, Matej Kosik
<5764c029b688c1c0d24a2e97cd764f@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 08/27/2015 02:55 PM, Runhang Li wrote:
>> Hi, Matej
>>
>> See if this issue answers your question: https://github.com/the-lambda-church/merlin/issues/358
>>
>> You can see all extensions that are being supported at src/kernel/extension.ml [1] .
>>
>> [1] : https://github.com/the-lambda-church/merlin/blob/master/src/kernel/extension.ml#L49
>
> Hi,
>
> If I understand this correctly, then the support for a particular syntactic extension need to be hardwired into merlin?
>
> Isn't that strange?
>
> (compared to tools such as:
>
>         - ocamlc
>         - ocamlopt
>         - ocamldep
>         - ocamldoc
>
>  which need not to be sperately modified to support any new (valid) syntactic extension. Do they?
> )
>
> Why is merlin different in this respect?
>
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