I have been for some time wrestling with how to get my Lua IDE [1] to
support easy user supplied API definitions when the users may only
have documentation to go on.
My initial thought was that since my editor supported type inference
of Lua source code. I could reuse that work to allow API's to be
defined using Lua. This works. I use it to define the file object in
the io library.
given
local a = io.open
typing a(): will provide completions for functions on the object
returned by io.open().
The problem with this of course is it is quite complicated by nature,
and to top it off my system used the module function as a sort of
pseudo keyword in order to reduce the overally complexity of code
analysis. For example getting all the Penlight code to understand its
own self references took some work - but it did work last time I tried
browsing the source.
Couple this with my other great idea to let you provide code
documentation using Lua scripts has lead to a system with a steep
learning curve, and somewhat unpredictable behavior.
Basically there is a lua script you can supply that will ask you for
the parameter info, short-text docs, long text docs, and link to and
external source. This has honestly worked really well for me, other
people have had trouble understanding it - but it is probably one of
the easiest to methods I have seen for solving this part of the problem.
I was wondering what ideas the community may have or know about that
would be useful in this regard. All angles of describing an API - but
specifically, the OO constructs, that use metatables or plain
functions on Class objects to let you create instances of a given class.
These have complex return types, and those return types will also need
to be understood by the documentation component. So a list of methods
you can call -i isn't enough. You also need to be able to identify
these object usages and provide documentation on types they may
return, etc.
In my current system - you can provide semantically aware completions
using Lua source code.
My goal was to reuse the code inference that was providing completions
everywhere else - and not require a special type description DSL.
I have changed jobs this year which has meant not working on the
plugin, but I'd like to restart. I have discovered I either need help
on the project, or need to engage the community more as I design
things to ensure that I don't overlook any really great ideas.
Anyhow - thank you in advance for your replies.
[1] https://bitbucket.org/sylvanaar2/lua-for-idea/wiki/Home
