The last couple of weeks I've been working on improving DLTK indexer, which was derived from JDT as is. The original bug report sounds like: "Indexing must be adapted for dynamic languages". I have to explain this point a little bit. In Java, every element reference is strongly bound to the original declaration. This is why one can calculate this binding during source code parsing and hold it in a memory (probably update it when referenced/referencing elements are changed). This is not the case for dynamic languages, consider this example (PHP):
<?php
function __autoload($class_name) {
require_once $class_name . '.php';
}
$obj = new MyClass();
?>
In this example PHP file is included before the class is loaded, and there's no way for IDE to determine which one. In order to have all JDT-like features in DLTK-based IDE resolution of elements binding is done each time from scratch. This ends up with a lot of queries and updates to index file, which are very I/O intensive operations.
We've tried to implement indexing using H2 database, and the results are really amazing! Here's a screen-cast showing how fast building of full hierarchy for 'Exception' class is using H2 database based index. Comparing to an older implementation I must admit that it's 10 times faster. Due to the fast access to the model most of other features will have great performance as well: Code Assist, Source Navigation, Source Editing, Mark Occurrences, etc...
I hope this will be included into DLTK 2.0.0 and PDT 2.2.0.
