[MonoDevelop] monodevelop-boo: What work lies ahead?

Michael Hutchinson m.j.hutchinson at gmail.com
Tue Feb 10 11:54:08 EST 2009


On Tue, Feb 10, 2009 at 10:22 AM, Lluis Sanchez Gual <lluis at novell.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
>> I've been a long-time user of Mono/MonoDevelop and just recently
>> discovered Boo. I noticed that the Boo support in MonoDevelop 1.9.1 no
>> longer has autocompletion support, and was wondering if there's
>> anything we can do to help.
>
> Thanks a lot for your interest. The code completion engine and MD's
> parser service api have undergone important changes in the past months
> and the Boo add-in has not been updated to use the new api. Migrating
> the code to use the new API shouldn't be too hard.
>
> However, the big problem of the Boo add-in is that it loads project
> assemblies into the MD process, and that should never be done. IIRC the
> parser provided by Boo and the Boo console load assemblies, so that has
> to be changed.

TBH the Boo Console doesn't matter since it has to load the assemblies
to run them. It's out-of-process so can be restarted (in theory).

A couple of notes:

The loading of referenced assemblies into the MD process prevents
rebuilding Boo projects correctly:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=324223
We have had segfaults reported on Debian due to the assembly loading:
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=377426

>> I noticed an earlier posting [1] to the list asking for help with the
>> project, and if time permits this term, I'd like to see if there's
>> anything I can do. My general question is, I guess, what work needs to
>> be done on the -boo plugin? I see that the parser needs some work for
>> code completion, and I also see that Boo uses GTKSourceView while the
>> other language support addins don't seem to?
>
> Boo uses GtkSourceView in the Boo console, which other languages don't
> have. It would be good to update the code to support GtkSourceView 2.0,
> so it can be built with recent linux distros which don't provide GSV 1.0
> anymore.

There is a patch in SVN for updating the boo console to use
GtkSourceView2: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=470460

It might also be nice to be able to build the Boo Binding without the
Boo Console, since this would simplify the dependencies, enable us to
e.g. ship it on OS X
(https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=361715).

Alternatively, porting the "Console" code to Mono.TextEditor and
moving it into core would make it near-trivial to add other consoles
such as Miguel's C# REPL.

And while we're on Boo Binding issues, IIRC  recent Stetic changes
would make it much easier to add GUI builder support
(https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=320881).

-- 
Michael Hutchinson
http://mjhutchinson.com


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