The only counter I have to "it wouldn't be all that hard to..." statements is that it is 2015, emacs can't even refactor things like xcode can do. And xcode is

The only counter I have to "it wouldn't be all that hard to..." statements is that it is 2015, emacs can't even refactor things like xcode can do. And xcode is considered horrible by refactoring standards. If it were so easy it would have happened by now. One can only conclude gcc and its stewardship have no real desire to allow for such a thing to occur at all. Which means llvm will likely be the future for being able to handle large complex code bases and interactivity with editors like emacs or vim, or whatever else. Why we have to reparse c/c++ in every editor alive when the compiler already does such things and would just need to dump out the information needed to understand it is beyond me. I only see 2 solutions to this situation. First is gcc gets left behind as a backwater compiler that won't interact with the real world due to religious reasons. Second is it gets forked and like ecgs before it, the fork becomes the canonical version (likely ignored by the gnu/fsf folks as being a heathen fork or whatever).