Re: Language Servers and Emacs

[phillip.lord@russet.org.uk (Phillip Lord)]

"Perry E. Metzger" <perry@piermont.com> writes:

> On Tue, 25 Apr 2017 18:06:40 -0500 Katherine Cox-Buday
> <cox.katherine.e@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I think that ENSIME (for Scala) has a protocol in there as
>> > well.  
>> 
>> They do, and there is an open discussion[1] on supporting the LSP
>> protocol.
>> 
>> Personally, I'd like to see broad support for this in emacs so I can
>> learn the "emacs way" of interacting with code that works across
>> various languages with different backends. It seems like every
>> language's mode/backend does things slightly differently.
>
> Indeed.
>
> I suspect that most of the ways of interacting with external language
> tools other than LSP will fade over time, but whether or not that's
> the case, it clearly seems to be smarter to have an external language
> tool than to have to duplicate the work of parsing and managing
> symbol tables inside the editor.

Well, this depends whether LSP is good or not. Even then, history
suggests that introduction of the one true standard, just results in yet
another technique for the same thing.

A brief look at LSP seems that it's relatively limited in scope,
though; it has some discussion of "capabilities" and "execute
command". How extensible is it? For instance, NREPL allows evalling
code, or loading files? Would it be possible to send enough data through
LSP to support edebug step through debugging for instance?

Phil