[billfruit]

And if you are in a legacy system with no clang then?

Emacs is usually batteries included, couldn't an lsp server have been part of the package..

[legends2k]

That'd increase the package disk footprint by a large value since there are many languages supported by Emacs by default.

[trealira]

Then it would just have a dependency on Clang, and you couldn't use Emacs at all (since you can't use Clang).

AFAIK, the only alternative to the clangd language server is ccls: https://github.com/MaskRay/ccls