-proceedOnError option (like ECJ) ?

[Mickael Istria]

Hi all,

Our team, made of various Eclipse JDT contributors, is currently looking at
allowing Eclipse JDT to directly use Javac instead of ECJ for Java code
parsing and resolution and code generation. The goal is to keep the higher
levels of Eclipse JDT and its ecosystem/plugins working, and allow to plug
a Javac-based backend under the hood as an alternative.
We've already made significant progress on this topic, and despite various
remaining glitches, a proof of concept is already kind of usable, with all
typical IDE features (code analysis, error reporting, selection,
completion, indexing...) provided by javac backend. We are then confident
that this is a viable approach on the mid to long term.
Ongoing work is happening at
https://github.com/eclipse-jdtls/eclipse-jdt-core-incubator

While working on it, we've identified some interesting features of ECJ that
are missing in Javac and that would be in our opinion extremely profitable
to IDE integration, but also could be profitable to other integrations as
they can shorten the feedback look tremendously in some cases.
The main feature we're missing from ECJ would be something equivalent to
its `-proceedOnError` flag. Basically, it makes that the compiler, when it
faces a compilation error, replaces the DOM/AST and the generated code with
`throw new CompilationError(compilationErrorMessage)`. This is extremely
convenient when debugging as it allows to hotswap some
not-yet-complete-but-already-interesting-to-debug code into a running
application.
Do you think Javac could some day provide such a feature too? This is not
(yet?) a request for enhancement, at this stage, we're just evaluating our
hopes of getting our integration supporting this important enough case in
the future. If there is no technical reason why not, then we may
investigate contributing it (of course, if someone wants to implement it in
the meantime, don't hesitate in coding it before us ;)

Cheers,
-- 
Mickael Istria
Eclipse IDE <https://www.eclipse.org/eclipseide> developer, for Red Hat
<https://developers.redhat.com/>
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