[NETBEANS-5992] Using groovy compiler for parsing, code completion and navigation in NetBeans IDE

• Type: Task
• Status: Open
• Priority: Major
• Resolution: Unresolved
• Component/s: groovy - Editor
• Assignee: Svatopluk Dedic
• Reporter: Svatopluk Dedic
• Created: 09/Sep/21 11:32
• Updated: 15/Sep/21 14:21

Description

NetBeans IDE has a tradition of using the real compiler for each language to provide the best user experience in its editor. A famous example is nb-javac - NetBeans fork of the javac compiler. Using the real Java compiler allowed NetBeans to keep the WYSIWYG experience (the errors reported in the editor are exactly the same as on command line or continuous integration) with relatively low effort. However maintaining a fork turned out to be costly and we are looking forward to reuse javac unmodified. With Groovy, we'd like to do even better. We want to contribute the IDE related fixes to the Groovy compiler to begin with!

This issue is an umbrella collecting various issues filed against Groovy. Fixing them would make the user experience of writing Groovy in the NetBeans IDE (and its derivatives like VSCode) better, richer, easier to use, faster to gain response and overall more reliable. In particular the IDE has to be able to deal with broken code (user code in editor is broken most of the time) - as such we expect fixes in the area of error recovery to make the parser more bulletproof and robust.

Some of the reported issues may feel strange from a plain Groovy point of view. Please take into account that the IDE needs to compute all the info without running the user code. As such it uses type checking and static compilation heavily. It would be ideal if the IDE could just use the static compilation info/errors and present them to the user in a reasonable and valuable way.

Issue Links

• is related to: GROOVY-10231 Groovy compiler loads user project class into JVM
• is related to: NETBEANS-6003 Groovy code completion does not offer field constants for enum values
• relates to: GROOVY-10219 Closure type for local var is inferred, but unavailable to Closure's contents
• relates to: GROOVY-10234 Groovyc throws Stackoverflow error on generic class with lower bound