SDP: Signatures Project

[joelmartinez]

A large portion of the mdoc codebase is related to creating language-specific signatures. This library easily be broken out into a separate library, and it would likely be useful for mono.cecil users individually (above and beyond our own needs). However, I'd like to explore potentially using another pre-existing library to do this formatting.

Goals

• Create a new project called Mdoc.Cecil.Formatters … porting the existing, C#, VB, F#, C++ (cli/cx), and JavaScript formatters.
• OR, Consider using the icsharpcode.decompiler library (used in VSMac's assembly browser):
  • https://github.com/icsharpcode/ILSpy/tree/master/ICSharpCode.Decompiler for C# and VB.NET
  • https://code.google.com/archive/p/ilspy-decompilation-to-fsharp-plugin/ for F#
• I'd like to (briefly) consider some upcoming work in dotnet core to provide a simple mono.cecil-like API in the BCL (MetadataLoadContext feature dotnet/corefx#33201). I will probably keep using mono.cecil, but due diligence dictates that we should check this out if the .NET team is putting weight behind this API.
• Parsing of DocIDs … this is something that mdoc (well, really Monodoc, a support library) currently supports, and has been useful in many instances, however it is unmaintainable at the moment due to the fact that it was code-generated from a grammar, using a tool that only exists (AFAIK) in the mono build-environment.