Lua Eclipse?

["Andre Carregal" <carregal@...>]

Hi,

There has been some postings on the use and development of Lua IDEs on this
list, and I would like to recall an approach initiated last year by Peter
Prade.

The Eclipse Project (http://www.eclipse.org) is defined as "...a kind of
universal tool platform - an open extensible IDE for anything and nothing in
particular.". It is an IDE framework where you can use different plugins to
achieve very sophisticated development environments.

There is a plethora of plugins for Eclipse including some for languages as
different as Java, C, C++, C#, Erlang, Goo, Pascal, Delphi, Python and Ruby.

I've been using Eclipse with Java and it's an amazing environment to work
with. Lots of people have been flocking to it, and some big companies are
betting their ranches on its success.

It would be fantastic to have a Lua Eclipse plugin. It would ease both the
use of Lua (since there would be an IDE with syntax highlight, code
completion, debugging and eventually code inspection) and the development of
the Lua plugin itself, since the Eclipse community would be contributing
with other extensions.

The plugin development could start as simply as a syntax highlight extension
and then use the more advanced features of the framework. Imagine someday
been able to analyze with code inspectors and UML renderers some Lua
snippet. The inspectors and UML renderers are already in Eclipse...

Correct me if I'm wrong, but maybe developing an extension to an existing
IDE is easier than developing the IDE itself and the extending it. As a side
effect, Lua would have some free marketing just by appearing in the
supported languages list. :o)

On the other hand it would be a 50M IDE for a 50K language... Not that I
would mind it, but I understand that the approach could be too cumbersome
for some people.

Would anyone be interested in the effort?

Thanks for the time, the message ended being a lot longer than intended.

Andre Carregal