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I'm looking into doing some sort of autocompletion related functionality for a project soon... so, why a separate daemon rather than ctags?

• alnayyir 16y ago
  I was actually looking into making something like this over the past couple weeks, and the answer is that the format is too constrained. It just doesn't express legitimately useful semantics that could be used for things like "go to definition", it would simply recurse all synonyms rather than understanding that you're specifying the instance of a class, and want to see the class definition. I'm actually feeling chastened now that this has come out for a relatively small language, but I haven't implemented my idea yet.
• lemming 16y ago
  Because ctags has extremely limited context sensitivity - i.e. it has no concept of the kind of symbol it's indexing, so editors can't use it in different ways depending on the cursor point. If you look at the code for IntelliJ plugins, the code for doing different sorts of completion in different contexts is actually really complex. Edit: moved unrelated questions to a top-level comment.