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by minraws 5 days ago
I wrote an LSP for kotlin and java recently and it's so annoying how tightly coupled all the LSP stuff is in IntelliJ to the IDE itself they have a outside LSP project which seems to be going very slow or nowhere is very sad.

Note I tried to use IntelliJ to build it the performance was not nearly as nice as I would have liked still better than a lot of LSPs but still.

I know a bunch of folks have tried it but I think only Jetbrains can build a good one, unless someone actually goes all in on solving this for a few months and rebuilds the parsing and types systems outside of the Jetbrains toolchain and ecosystem.

Java is likely easier but it's also quite jank in terms of how existing solutions work.

But I like projects like this, I am not against IntelliJ it must be great had been great when I was learning but I want a lsp to use for scripts and the small edits, opening a massive IDE is very overkill for the kinds of small changes I like to make now.

1 comments

I will quote the blog post announcing Kotlin as project, so naturally it is tied to InteliJ.

"The next thing is also fairly straightforward: we expect Kotlin to drive the sales of IntelliJ IDEA. We’re working on a new language, but we do not plan to replace the entire ecosystem of libraries that have been built for the JVM. So you’re likely to keep using Spring and Hibernate, or other similar frameworks, in your projects built with Kotlin. And while the development tools for Kotlin itself are going to be free and open-source, the support for the enterprise development frameworks and tools will remain part of IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate, the commercial version of the IDE. And of course the framework support will be fully integrated with Kotlin."

https://blog.jetbrains.com/kotlin/2011/08/why-jetbrains-need...

Given how much outside support they have received they could also make a paid lsp available like they had Resharper, I would be willing to pay for a paid lsp if I use the language enough.

10$ a month for an LSP with all the bells and whistles, should be easier to maintain than an entire IDE tbh. And they can sell me on advanced features in their IDEs through it.

I just don't want to have to open a bulky IDE anymore, IDEs just suck for me as a development tool.