[fpc-devel] darwin - rtl include files

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Wed, 17 May 2006, schreef Michael Van Canneyt:

> > > > source
> > > > locations?
> > > 
> > > According to daniel: yes
> > > 
> > > But you should separate 2 things:
> > > - Provide feedback (tooltips, code completion)
> > > - View actual sources.
> > > 
> > > For the first, the .ppu is enough. In Delphi 'Find declaration' also
> > > doesn't work half the time...
> > 
> > Reading .ppu files is definitely planned for the codetools. But as Daniel
> > pointed out: If the .ppu format changes all ppu become unreadable.
> 
> The format is such that you can always read older/newer .ppu files:
> there are just certain types of blocks which you can't handle.

I think reading ppu files can be done reliably with the help of some meta 
data that describes the structure of the record. If you read a record 
from ppu, things will break if we change record. However, with some 
metadata that would get updated if the record changes an IDE would be able 
to get to the data reliably.

The funny thing is that the compiler already generates such metadata: 
Runtime Type Information. However, it is burried in the compiler 
executable, and smartlinked away, so RTTI is currently not usable for this 
purpose.

Daniël