Re: Language Servers and Emacs

[Perry E. Metzger]

On Wed, 12 Apr 2017 09:39:48 +0200 Helmut Eller
<address@hidden> wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 11 2017, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
> 
> > I'm mentioning this here because I think the Emacs community
> > would be interested in this capability, though I suspect that it
> > would also be really neat if GCC developed a language server for
> > C and C++.  
> 
> The client side of the protocol seems fairly easy to implement in
> Emacs, so I think this is primarily a (big) task for GCC
> developers.  We could implement a server for Elisp on top of
> bytecomp.el, but I doubt that anybody has time/motivation for that.
> 
> I note that some Clang developers are working on a server:
> http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2017-January/052458.html
> 
> So it seems likely that Clang will support the protocol long before
> GCC does.  It might also have political implications if Emacs
> implements the client side if Clang is the only server for C/C++.

There are servers for many other languages too, this is not a C/C++
only issue. (And I think GCC needs to gain this capability in any
case, it appears that it is being rapidly adopted. There are now
langserv implementations for dozens of languages -- Python, Java, PHP,
Go, Rust, Swift, JavaScript, C#, Julia, Scala, and the list goes on,
plus there are a bunch of IDEs adopting the protocol too, and support
for the vim and Atom editors are coming.)

Architecturally, this is certainly the right thing. One would
generally far prefer to have the language implementation help the
editor with parsing than have to re-implement parsing inside the
editor.

-- 
Perry E. Metzger                address@hidden