Hi everyone. I'm the lead developer of RustDT, DDT, and Goclipse, which are open-source Eclipse-based IDEs for Rust, D and Go (respectively).
I'd like to gauge the interest there would be in the Nim community for an Eclipse-based IDE for Nim. All the other IDEs I mentioned above are built around a common Eclipse IDE framework (MelnormeEclipse), which makes it relatively easier to add support for new languages to Eclipse. Even more so because MelnormeEclipse is more oriented for languages that have external tools providing semantic functionality (that is, autocompletion deamons, compiler as service, package managers, etc.), and Nim seems to be pretty advanced in that regard: http://nim-lang.org/docs/idetools.html
In fact, Nim seems to have best IDE tools support of all the other 3 languages mentioned before (although the Rust team is planning to catch up on that).
Now, keep in mind I don't use Nim, nor I plan to, on real-world programs. But I would love to have more users of my IDE products (for fame and glory :p ). Even better if I could have people contribute some code once in while, although that seems unlikely.
From my quick glance of the status quo of IDE support in Nim, it doesn't seem that good. So it seems a somewhat more advanced IDE would be quite welcome. That said, a lot of people are very adverse to Eclipse, for a variety of reasons (some of them good reasons, some of them, not really...). Hence me looking to gauge interest.
For the record, the feature set I think we could get with just 1-2 months of work would be something like:
Hello Bruno and welcome to the Nim forums :)
Personally I try to stay away from anything that requires a JVM (perhaps I need to stop doing that). But despite that, I would love to see a Nim IDE based on Eclipse and would likely use it. If it integrates debugging support then I'm sure it will be very popular. I am also aware that many developers start out with Eclipse, having a Nim IDE that is based on Eclipse would certainly help those developers get started with Nim.
After spending a lot of time working on a custom IDE for Nim, I think it's safe to say that our best bet is to develop a solid IDE tools platform. Then integrate it into as many existing open source IDEs as possible, people already have their favourite tools and it would be great if they could use them.
I haven't looked at Nim's IDE tools in a while, but I still feel like they are not as solid as they should be. So you may run into some problems with them. Of course, the best way to improve them is if more people use them :)
So yeah, please consider me very interested!
For PHP and Python I used Eclipse in the past... moved over to Netbeans and landed at the BrainStorm Tools (esp. PHPStorm, PyCharm). I would prefer stable plugin for them over Eclipse to be honest.
I believe that the current IDE support is pretty nice already: Sublime, Atom, VSCode are what I used so far. As long as there is nothing which can cope with what PHPStorm can do (Complex Analysis, Refactoring and so on), there is always more or less "par" between the tools and preference is based on other topics (configuration, multi-cursor handling, project setup).
Afaik they are all using "nim check" and "nimsuggest". I thought that "nim idetools" is old and dead and that nimsuggest is the way to go.
Having an "top notch" IDE for Nim would be good, but I fear that the list of features you can include in Eclipse it what all the other IDE Extension/Plugins offer already. I for myself use Visual Studio Code for some time now and none of the features you listed would make me change to Eclipse.
BUT of course it would be cool to have Eclipse support in the list :)
I believe that the current IDE support is pretty nice already
Hum, I only noticed https://github.com/nim-lang/Nim/wiki/editor-support after posting, so yeah, seems the Nim IDE situation is better than I thought. Before, I pretty much only looked at Aporia IDE, which seems a bit basic...
vscode-nim in particular looks quite good (looking at it's feature list). The only significant advantage an Eclipse integration like mine could offer is debugger integration, I think.
Afaik they are all using "nim check" and "nimsuggest". I thought that "nim idetools" is old and dead and that nimsuggest is the way to go.
I'd be interested to hear more about that. I didn't know about nimsuggest, and definitely don't know the background of those two tools, or how they compare to each other.
I used "Native Debug" with vscode-nim (and build a signed GDB for that). It is actively developed at the moment: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=webfreak.debug
I also locked at "endb" (http://nim-lang.org/docs/endb.html) and talked shortly with araq about using the Nim executable itself as Debug host for the Debug API of VSCode. Which could be nice for less complex programs. But I fear that is not what one wants to debug usually :). For other stuff endb may be just to slow.
Using GDB or other debuggers works reasonably well. The same goes for tools like cachegrind. I even get correct source-code displays with graphical profiler tools as Nim does add good symbol and line info if requested.
Nimsuggest is really useful already! There are also a couple of weirdnesses like highlighting starting at the wrong place for exported types and some key features lacking, mostly for more powerful completion, though.
Anyway, Eclipse ide would be great to have!