[charlieflowers]

I think for right now the main idea in the area of IDE features is to have an "open compiler" so that there is programmatic access to the abstract syntax tree of your programming languages (aka, "compiler as a service").

This has been a neat-o feature which slowly became nice-to-have, but it is fast becoming a requirement. For example, the JetBrains products (Idea, Resharper, etc.), and also what Google is doing with clang to help them manage their large C/C++ codebase.

We already compile/interpret our languages. So we need to open up that "machine understanding" to programmatic access, which IDE's and other tools can then use to do all kinds of nice things.

[jacabado]

Roslyn from Microsoft is also an initiative in this direction.

But it has been on beta for almost 3 years I think. I wonder if it will ever go forward.