[dylan] An experiment with IntelliJ

Hey all,

I had a crazy idea this week to see about adding at least some Dylan
support to the IntelliJ IDE via a plugin. It is pretty well suited to
custom language plugins with plugins and / or full IDEs existing for Java,
Scala, Python, Ruby, PHP, Objective C, C++, Lua, Erlang, Haskell and a
number of other languages. Some of these are actual products from JetBrains
(maker of IntelliJ) while others are open source or community projects.

I've got a start that identifies files by their extension (.dylan, .lid,
.intr) and has the start of a parser for LID files (including syntax
highlighting):

    https://github.com/dylan-foundry/DeftIDEA

I plan to start lexing Dylan and then syntax highlighting for Dylan will
work (without a full blown parser).

I'd be interested in talking about this more, especially if some others out
there would like to help extend it. There are a lot of examples for how to
do things given the number of open source plugins (and that the core of
IntelliJ is all open source), so it is pretty easy to get a lot of things
working.

Easy things that I could see happening in the future:


   - Support for running dylan-compiler and identifying warnings, serious
   warnings and errors.
   - Lexing Dylan to provide proper syntax highlighting.
   - Accessing some of the data from the Dylan compiler to provide feedback.
   - Starting to parse Dylan into IntelliJ's PSI (like an AST) for doing
   completion and so on.
   - Improving the LID file lexer and parser so that we can highlight files
   that don't exist, improper usage of the Dylan extension (a warning), and
   other IDE-like things.


Anyone interested in helping out? I've already gotten a contribution of 3
icons for the file types!  So far, this is a lot easier going than writing
Eclipse plugins was in the past.

 - Bruce

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