[jrockway]

> why does an IDE need to be designed for a language anyway

People want their IDE to do all the ancillary tasks, and Go builds most of these into the core, so it's a good first target. You can be "feature complete" without complexity.

Consider the case of a C++ IDE. Which compiler do you support; gcc, clang, msvc? Which build system do you support; Bazel, make, cmake, gyp, autotools? Which C++ standard version does the syntax highlighter support; can you change it per-project? If you do change it per-project, how do you configure this?

If you pick some opinionated subset, your userbase is 0 people. If you support everything people want, you have 30 people working on it for 10 years and you still fail.