How to Design an IDE-Friendly Language
summary
JetBrains compares many languages and claims five things make IDE support cheap: single-file indexability so editors only reindex one file, clear unambiguous syntax to avoid parsing or macros, explicit declarations so go-to and rename work, resolvable references without project-wide inference, and static typing speeds things up for fast, reliable refactorings. Examples include Java’s source‑level version flags, C/C++ includes forcing massive reindexing, Haskell’s custom operators requiring cross‑file lookup, and Groovy’s annotation processors/AST transforms that demand duplicating compile logic in the IDE.
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chapters (24)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:43Myself working on language support infrastructure
- 1:48What's IDE-friendly? Basic support
- 3:24An IDE needs to recognize...
- 6:47By single file's content: violations
- 9:49Determine syntactic construction
- 10:331.1. Syntax scrambled by templating/macros
- 11:511.2. Syntax depending on non-local information
- 13:331.3. Complicated parsing
- 14:291.4. Slow parsing
- 15:051.5. Syntactic ambiguities on incomplete code
- 17:51What's declared?
- 19:072.1. Declaring by call
- 20:5822. Declaring by compiler plugin
- 23:01Which names are referenced?
- 23:58Which names are referenced: implicit calls
- 27:023. Which names are referenced: Java lambdas
- 29:58Resolve hints: where to look for declarations
- 31:45Resolve hints: ideal (Haskell)
- 32:364. Resolve hints: Java
- 34:394. Resolve hints: local type inference
- 35:244. Resolve hints: return type inference
- 38:57constraints to boost your creativity!
- 43:23IDE-friendly and people-friendly
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