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474 :: Few Q's about Nimrod

• Bumbles (orginal) [2014-06-17T18:27:42+02:00] view original

  Hello, this language seems really nice, just had a few random Q's based on reading the docs and trying it out in sublime text with the nimrod package

  1. Can you do any kind of reflection? I don't see it mentioned in the docs? Compile time reflection? Or attributes ?

  2. The plugin for sublime text appears to add syntax highlighting and very basic completion.

     Is possible, using the current "Idetools" to go beyond this? I'm used to Visual Assist+ Visual Studio C++ which has refactoring, and where more contextual information is presented. lets say you wanted to create an extension for visual studio, does "idetools"/compiler supply enough information to pull off these feats?

     1. hovering over a variable in sublime I get no context information: can idetools be used to display type, name, associated comment etc?
     2. what about refactoring, rename a type or move some code into a proc?
     3. find all references to a given symbol?(accurately, not string matching)

  3. Is there any way to tell nimrod to output C++ instead of C? To create classes with methods by assembling types with associated procs? I ask because it would seem easier to interface with C++ instead of having a C style interface.
  4. Debugger: I see a command line debugger, is there any interactive(visual studio style) debugger? I suppose it could be written by adapting the command line one? Although it looks like the resulting code would be super slow?

  Thanks

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• Bumbles (orginal) [2014-06-17T18:35:24+02:00] view original

  Actually, assuming Nimrod has any kind of reflection, perhaps it is possible to use it to "emit" a C++ wrapper for a given type?

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• gradha (orginal) [2014-06-17T23:10:35+02:00] view original

  In Nimrod you have compile time macros where you get an abstract syntax tree and generate another one, so you have most of the same information the compiler has. Recently adrianv posted benchmars of some oop macros. If you go to his repo you will find ooHelper.nim which may illustrate what can be done. Nimrod also comes with a test suite you can look for examples of advanced macro usage.

  The IDE integration guide covers usage of idetools. More specifically:

  1. It should through the --def option. If it doesn't offer the docstring yet it could in the future.
  2. Refactoring is a thorny issue because of the flexible syntax, so even if you made it work, people may not like it if it doesn't fit their style.
  3. Symbol usages may be covered through the --usages option.

  You can output C++ code with the compileToCpp compiler command. You can write nimrod procs and export them as C functions with the exportc pragma. At the moment there is no higher cpp integration, maybe you could use the emit pragma or look at the cpp example.

  The debugger doesn't seem to get much use.

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• Araq (orginal) [2014-06-17T23:42:54+02:00] view original

  In addition to what gradha said, there is also runtime type information as a mild form of reflection which is used by the marshal.nim module. Also I disagree about his point (2): refactorings are not particularly harder to do for Nimrod and nimrod pretty can already perform a form of global renaming.

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