I think that the best solution would be to understand the problems caused by etags. In QDevelop we already seen people running MacOS which had problems with the ctags binary available on their system. There must be a commont ground for all those applications.

About speed? No speed. The crapiest parameters of all these "IDE"s we are seeing in the last year is the syntax highlighter. On all it just stinks, and it's slow as hell.