
Common Language Server Protocol - seanmcb
https://code.visualstudio.com/blogs/2016/06/27/common-language-protocol
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adontz
I think Visual Studio Code introduces much better extensibility philosophy
than Visual Studio.

Of course VS is old product and has some legacy we have to excuse, like COM,
writing tons of boilerplate code just to show item in context menu, etc., but
I mean philosophy of being friendly to everyone, regardless of underlying
technology, is very important. For instance, writing language service, in C++
or C# only is a real limitation for some languages and prevents many languages
of being integrated, so "Common Protocol for Languages" is right decision.

From another side, Visual Studio is very powerful in terms of customization.
Creating virtual item hierarchy is easy (if we consider something can be easy
when creating Visual Studio extension), so we have things like database
project, with a lot of items, but no real files. I look forward to find
similar possibilities in Visual Studio Code.

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dantiberian
Decoupling the language support from the tool will be great if it gets wider
support. This would give new editors a big leg up, as they _only_ need to
support the protocol and handle editing, and can lean on other parties to
provide cross tooling language support. The same applies for new languages,
write the server once, and get support from many tools.

The most interesting part of this announcement was who they didn't mention:
JetBrains. It will be interesting to see if they come on board with this.

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weberc2
This is cool. Presumably this could be implemented for other editors (vim,
emacs, etc) so the language servers could be shared across editors.

~~~
Nullabillity
Many languages already have something like this. For example, look into
ENSIME, ghc-modi, and Racer. I guess the innovation here would be a common
protocol for "any" language, but I somewhat doubt that this will have much
adoption outside of the .NET/Typescript communities.

~~~
zastrowm
Well it's nice to know there's at least some 3rd party support listed:

> the protocol has been adopted by Codenvy, who have added it to the next
> generation Eclipse IDE, Eclipse Che, as well as by Red Hat, who are working
> to publish a standalone language server for Java which can be consumed by
> any tool that utilizes the protocol.

> ... communities for programming languages like OmniSharp (C#), JSON, C++,
> xText, JavaFX, and R have made commitments to release language servers for
> their languages in the future.

Obviously we'll see if it actually happens, but at least other's are looking
to support it.

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nippur72
is this server protocol also responsible for syntax highlight (aka
colorization) of the source code?

