Improving Code Completion in Pharo
- 1. IMPROVING CODE COMPLETION work by Myroslava Romaniuk and Marcus Denker
- 2. What is Code Completion?
- 3. Problem ➥ on a Parser level ➥ on a Model level ➥ on a Sorter level
- 4. Problem: parser Old completion used a dedicated parser (Shout) that was originally shared with syntax highlighter
- 5. Solution: use RB Parser RBParser is used for syntax highlighting We parse at every keystroke! We can parse with Syntax Errors
- 7. Solution: TypingVisitor AST has not enough information self, super, class of literals, Globals and direct assignments to temps.
- 9. Problem: model Code is very hard to understand and change. And the implementation behind the model itself is unnecessarily complicated
- 10. Solution: model ➥ Type annotated AST ➥ CompletionProducer for suggesting completion options based on node type
- 12. Solution: model results ➥ Using the AST simplifies the code a lot ➥ It is faster (no Benchmarks yet)
- 13. Problem: sorter It was very difficult to implement a sorting strategy as there was no separate implementation of sorting
- 14. Solution: sorter ➥ you can choose the sorting strategy you want in the settings (alphabetic by default) ➥ sorting strategies based on n-gram and OCompletion will be added later
- 15. Refactoring results # of classes 43 vs 22 # of methods 485 vs 243 # lines of code 3369 vs 1383
- 16. More improvements ➥ added completion for symbols ➥ fixed AST implementation
- 17. Fixing AST bugs ➥ incorrect stop in RBSequenceNode ➥ incorrect start in ParseErrorNode ➥ not recognising missing closing ‘|’ in temp declaration as incorrect syntax
- 18. Future work ➥ ML based sorting strategy ➥ completing with syntax errors ➥ going beyond selector completion