Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

For the people responding to you who are saying you can get all the same things in vim, they're right of course, but a lot of this modern functionality is now built on top of the Language Server Protocol[1], which is an open standard created by microsoft for VS Code.

Kudos on the people who have ported this to Vim[2], but I suspect the support for LSP features will still be better in VS Code

[1] https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/

[2] https://github.com/prabirshrestha/vim-lsp

View on HN

Code completion, search, cross referencing, and all sorts of other features in vim, emacs, and all kinds of other editors (including Visual Studio) predate LSP by decades.

LSP is cool though, an advancement certainly, but it is not a completely new thing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ctags

If you think ctags or rtags are even remotely comparable to what an actual IDE brings you you have absolutely never used more than 10% of what an IDE with semantic understanding of your code can do

The post I replied to brought up a very narrow set of features that had been available in vim for a long time.

it brings up "Code completion, search, cross referencing, and all sorts of other feature" and again, those work much less well in ctags / rtags than with a proper IDE

Kind of a perpendicular discussion but it amazes me that with this language server thing hipsters turned what was a very mature and proven pattern (a plugin architecture) into a distributed software problem. My god talk about doing shit the hard way...

The plugin architectures that I've seen require plugins to be written in the same language as the IDE. For example, Eclipse plugins need to be written in Java.

Language servers run in a separate process to the editor, and they communicate over JSON-RPC. The nice thing about this is that the language server can be written in any programming language - which usually ends up being the language of the code being edited, rather than the language that the editor was written in.

This makes it a lot easier for language servers to be written and maintained by the people who maintain the compilers for those languages, e.g. gopls is written by the Go developers, clangd is part of LLVM.

LSPs turn a M*N problem into an (ideally) M+N problem. You can't do that with any existing single editor's plugin architecture, basically by definition.

Ctags is a better analogy, and LSP has fairly obvious advantages compared to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com