Language Servers Are Cool

In slight contrast to my previous post where I espoused the virtue of code being text and not relying on developer tooling to interact with it: language servers are cool.

They decouple the back end of gaining semantic understanding of code in a particular language from the editor implementation. A language server for each language can be written, and the editor only needs to integrate the language server protocol once, to get a host of IDE style features for each language.

This is the sort of solution we need to get rid of editor lock in, and allow text editors to compete to be the best at editing text. With language servers, adding language support for an editor is cheap. Hopefully now developers will start choosing text editors on the grounds of how good they are at editing text, rather than the shopping list of languages they support.

I’ve used rls for rust, and clangd for C++ with the languageClient-neovim for neovim. I’ve been the envy of colleagues who use Vim-like editors for the impressive language support, and the envy of colleagues who use IDEs for the superior text editing… Not really. They don’t see why I can’t just install their IDE and be done with it. Anyway,language servers are a great bit of technology.