Writing your own IDE versus supporting an existing one
Writing an IDE is a large project and could be the subject of an entire book. If all you want is for your new language to be supported by a good IDE, just figure out how to support your language within an existing popular IDE. This is especially true if supporting your language requires nothing unusual that existing IDEs do not already do. It is a big job, bigger in some IDEs than in others, but most of this chapter provides an example of how to do it in one mainstream IDE.
On the other hand, there are several reasons that you might decide to write your own IDE. Writing an IDE puts you in control. Writing an IDE in your new language can be a convincing demonstration of how awesome your new language is, that it has better user interface capabilities than mainstream languages, or that it has achieved a level of maturity and usability by virtue of a suitably robust class library and system interface.
Unlike other chapters...