Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[David Engster]

John Yates writes:
> I was responding to this paragraph:
>
>> CEDET will most probably never be able to refactor C++ code, aside from
>> very simple cases. There are very few IDEs out there which even try to
>> do that; from my experience, none of them do it 100% reliably (just
>> bring some meta template programming into the game and see what
>> happens). IMHO, "Refactoring C++" should not be in the job description.
>
> To me that sounded like you were dismissing all attempts across all IDEs to
> implement "Refactoring C++".  Perhaps on re-reading what you meant was that
> 100% reliable refactoring of C++ should not be a CEDET goal.  Was that what 
> you
> meant?

It is not *my* goal, and it is used here to steer people away from
working on Semantic's C++ parser, saying it is pointless if it can never
do refactoring, which is a *much* harder problem than providing
completions. I don't see the point in discouraging people like that.

Anyway, Stefan gave is OK on libclang usage, so the initial problem that
started this discussion is solved, and I suggest you start hacking.

>     I did say that if you will accept nothing less than perfection,
>     then by all means implement your clang-based silver bullet.
>
> Do you foresee a future in which Emacs + ELPA will offer "lead bullet" level
> C++ refactoring?

As always: unless someone starts working on these things, nothing will
happen, and surely nothing comes out of those centi-threads we seem to
have every month nowadays.

-David