Re: Guile outside of Emacs + Geiser

[Christine Lemmer-Webber]

That's interesting.  Thank you for both the work and the observations
Ricardo!

It's interesting to hear, but maybe not surprising, that LSP seems to be
more oriented around a static programming mindset than a lispy
REPL-oriented development environment.

I guess it will be, as you say, more dedicated work to get proper Guile
support into these editors aside from "just using LSP", but that wasn't
obvious to me until I heard of your experiences!

 - Christine

"Ricardo G. Herdt" <r.herdt@posteo.de> writes:

> Hi Christine,
>
> I started writing a Guile LSP server a while ago
> (https://codeberg.org/rgherdt/scheme-lsp-server). Like you said it is
> incomplete, but I got following features so far:
>
> - show signature
> - show documentation
> - autocompletion
> - jump to definition
> - show diagnostics
>
> There is an open issue to integrate it into Guix:
> https://issues.guix.gnu.org/60286
>
> I also wrote a simple client for VS Code:
> https://codeberg.org/rgherdt/vscode-scheme-lsp
> This extension is focused on LSP support though, sort of a proof of
> concept. Syntax highlighting, REPL support etc could be integrated
> with other extensions. Or someone could implement a more involved
> extension to integrate these features, like what Magic Racket seems to
> do.
>
> Honestly I have mixed feelings towards LSP. It's kind of a different
> mindset compared to traditional lisp editors: you get a language
> server that typically analyses the project statically, providing
> information regardless of the user's interaction with the REPL. My
> implementation relies, at least for Guile, on Geiser, so it works by
> interaction with a running Guile instance in the background. It might
> be enough for users coming from other editors, but I still prefer the
> way Slime/Swank works, where the REPL is the same image that provides
> information to the editor.
>
> Regards,
>
> Ricardo
>
> Am 27.09.2023 21:07 schrieb Christine Lemmer-Webber:
>> There's a long thread on guix-devel which is related and touches on
>> many
>> things, but I thought I'd narrow in on this one thing.
>> Has anyone had a "good" experience programming with Guile without
>> using
>> Emacs?  If so, what was your development experience like?
>> Furthermore, what's the right direction to making non-Emacs users
>> have
>> as nice of an experience as Emacs users do?  Racket, for instance, has
>> lovely support in vscode with "Magic Racket".  What's the right path to
>> recommend for the present, and what's the best path to improve the
>> future?  LSP?  There are a few incomplete implementations I think but I
>> haven't tried them.
>> (Let's leave aside whether or not everyone should be using Emacs, or
>> other approaches to make Emacs easier for newcomers.  This thread is
>> specifically about making Guile useful to people who already have a
>> tool
>> they like and present experiences.)
>>  - Christine