Fancy tools support!

[Vlad Dumitrescu]

From: "Luke Gorrie" <luke@REDACTED>
>I'd like some new and exciting runtime features for
> doing helpful things in development tools like Distel. Some of this
> might already exist without my knowing it - I'm looking for feedback.

I'm all behind you on this! :-)

>   Cross referencing, e.g.
>     %% who_calls(Module, Function, Arity) -> [{M,F,A}]
>     %% List all the known callers of Module:Function/Arity.
>   Simple enough - of course it can't be perfect what with 'apply', but
>   it can still be much better and more convenient than 'grep'. It's
>   very nice to get hyperlinks to all callers of a function at the
>   touch of a key in Emacs. (I think Thomas Lindgren has a parse
>   transform for adding this to module_info? Jungerl it?)

Hmm, one really needs to use xref every time something is compiled in order
to get accurate info, and thet might make compilation slow. Approximations
(like for example callers from the standard libraries) would still be
useful, but it can be dangerous to rely on an incomplete list.

>   Online function documentation (like Lisp "docstrings").
>   Argument list summaries.

Yes!

I'd like to add background automatic compilation whenever a file is saved in
Emacs (á la Eclipse). Then one could also run xref, without (big) penalty.

regards,
Vlad