| I've responded on reddit before (https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1eqqwa7/comment/lhwwn...), but I'll restate and cover some other things here. > I have a maybe wrong and bad opinion that LSP is actually at the wrong level. Right now every language needs to implement a from scratch implementation of their LSP server. These implementations are HUGE and take YEARS to develop. rust-analyzer is over 365,000 lines of code. And every language has their own massive, independent implementation. rust-analyzer a big codebase, but it's also less problematic than the raw numbers would make you think. rust-analyzer has a bunch of advanced functionality (term search https://github.com/rust-lang/rust-analyzer/pull/16092 and refactors), assists (nearly 20% of rust-analyzer!) and tests. > I think there should be a common Intellisense Database file format for providing LSP or LSP-like capabilities. Ok sure there will still be per-language work to be done to implement the IDB format. I think you might be describing formats like (https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2019/02/19/lsif) and SCIP (https://github.com/sourcegraph/scip). I personally like SCIP a bit more LSIF because SCIP's design makes it substantially easier to incrementally update a large index. We use SCIP with Glean (https://glean.software/) at work; it's pretty nice. > But you'd get like 95% of the implementation for free for any LLVM language. And generating a common IDB format should be a lot simpler than implementing a kajillion LSP protocols. I wouldn't say 95%. SCIP/LSIF can do the job for navigation, but that's only a subset of what you want from an IDE. For example:
- Intellisense/autocomplete is extremely latency sensitive where milliseconds count. If you have features like Rust/Haskell's traits/typeclasses that allow writing blanket implementations like `impl<T> SomeTrait for T`, it's often faster to try to solve that trait bound on-the-fly than storing/persisting that data.
- It'd be nice to handle features like refactors/assists/lightbulbs. That's going to result in a bunch of de novo code needs to exist outside of a standard compiler, not counting all the supporting infrastructure. > My dream world has a support file that contains: full debug symbols, full source code, and full intellisense data. Rust tried something similar in 2017 with the Rust Language Server (RLS, https://github.com/rust-lang/rls). It worked, but most people found it too slow because it was invoking a batch compiler on every keystroke. |