Hacking - vtg - Project Hosting on Google Code

Updated Sep 27, 2008 by sejerpz
Labels:	Featured

Hacking

#Want to hack on Vtg?

Introduction

These are some sparse notes on the project source tree structure.

Directory structure

root
 +---- vsc:  static library containing the completion engine
 |
 +---- vsc-shell: unfinished shell useful to debug the
 |                completion engine, but it could be used
 |                to implement Vala completion also in other
 |                editors like emacs, vi etc...
 |
 +---- vtg: the GEdit plugin

Vsc (Vala symbol completion)

Is a static library and neither the api nor the abi are finalized etc etc.

The main concept is that there are 2 code context that are parsed by a worker thread as needed.

The first one called primary context will go through:

the vala parser
symbol resolver
semantic analyzer

So its processing will be slower compared to the second one.

The second one called secondary context will go through only the vala parser.

This is needed to differentiate the 2 common cases:

source that doesn't change much or at all in a session like vapi files (primary context)
source that changes frequently like the current edited buffer and that can contains error etc (secondary context)

The engine will try to infere the variable type in the current buffer and than with that information search for the type definition first in the secondary context and then in the primary.

Vsc Shell

This program was originally written to quickly prototipe the completion engine and as an aid to learn libvala internals.

If enhanced can be useful to provide the completion functionality to other application by issuing command & query on the standard input and receiving the responses on the standard output in a client / server like model.

Can be also useful to write a simple set of test script in an hypotetical test suite for the completion engine.