scip

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.

less willing to hitch my wagon to their train