Rather than work on the HLSL parser itself, I've focused my efforts on a language builder IDE, that provides tools to easily build complete front-ends for languages, including support for all of the features people have come to expect from a language's tools. I'm calling this project SlimLang for now because I'm unimaginative and the "Slim" moniker has a good reputation associated with it.
Work on the incremental parser has been difficult, due both to the complexity as well as lack of information on them out on the net, so one of the tools I really want to add to the IDE is a built-in debugger to allow stepping through the parser as it runs and see the output as a visual graph as it's being constructed. It should really help my implementation of the parser, which I can then provide as a separate component to use in conjunction with the parse tables generated by the IDE.
For the visual graph part, I found the library OpenGraph and Graph#, and for the text editor for specifying the language grammar I found AvalonEdit, both of which are WPF libraries, so I decided to take my project in that direction. I haven't been fond of WPF, but recent changes in WPF4 have definitely improved things for the better. Compare the text rendering quality between the old and new versions below:
You can also see from those images my work on a tab control style that mimics the property page tab found in Visual Studio. I didn't know much about styling when I started, so it was basically a crash course for me. The ends results are pretty good though:
I integrated the text editor to allow for specifying the grammar and wrote a quick manual parser to read it. Also got the error list hooked up nicely. All in all, it was a good few days of work.
Also some work using a DataGrid for editing terminal options:
Hopefully this should make further work on the HLSL plugin much easier, as well as provide a platform for anyone with a personal scripting language to create easy plugins for language support, which can really aid usage and adoption of a new language.
I was thinking about making these two things open source (the HLSL plugin and the SlimLang IDE), but I'm also leaning towards providing them for sale to try to get some actual income. Any thoughts on whether these two tools would be useful enough to anyone to be worth spending the money?
