rls

ormat 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.

e great tooling boosts language adoption. Rust has done a great job here, with an official language server (https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rls). The Go team is investigating building an official language server, which we would love (we built an unofficial one and are happy to deprecate it in favor of an official one, or help make it official--whatever is easiest for the Go team/community). For languages that don't yet have a good language server, we would dearly love to sponsor the creation of one, but it's quite time consuming to do so. It takes a while to find the right person to build it for each language (esp. for languages we aren't familiar with), and the majority of these projects have not yielded a working language server, so that hasn't been as easy as we had hoped. This is the main bottleneck. And in all cases, we want to make it so there's a huge reward to building a great language server. When you build a language server, you can use Sourcegraph to run it for all code you view on GitHub, Bitbucket Server, and (soon) other code hosts. That means you get hovers, go-to-definition, find-references, etc., in code files and PRs in your existing tools. (See https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sourcegraph-for-gi... or the Firefox extension to start using that.) The process for taking a language server and deploying it to Sourcegraph currently requires some intervention from us, but we are changing that with https://github.com/sourcegraph/sourcegraph-extension-api. This will also make it much easier to take a language server and make it work in all editors, without writing per-editor shim extensions.

e it there are two camps on this issue. There's the "text editor" camp who use vim/emacs/sublime and when they are asking for IDE support they just mean autocomplete and jump-to that works from their editor. Then there's the camp coming from Eclipse or VS who want the whole deal. The Rust Language Server project (https://github.com/jonathandturner/rls) is working on exposing this info from the compiler in a structured form so that IDEs and "text editor"s alike can get IDE features.