There are several different LSP implementations of Elixir, each with their own pros and cons. Last year they all agreed to collaborate on an LSP; is this going to be the result of that?
The architecture is remarkable. The lengths they’ve gone to for language version compatibility, and protecting app namespaces is especially impressive.
Namespaces aren't so much a concept in Elixir, but this refers to the names used for things like modules. Expert will rewrite the code of its "engine" so that the engine's code and dependencies and those of the application it is embedded into don't overlap.
Oo I’m excited for this. The old official language server is fine—it does its job on most of the code bases I’ve worked on, but occasionally I will do something funny that makes the compiler slow down and that pummels the LS performance. I hope this works out some of the kinks that occasionally would make elixir-ls slow.
Nit: there has never been an official LSP implementation until now, only community-authored. Even now no Dashbit employees or language core members are directly involved in this project in an ongoing basis.
IMO that contributes powerfully to the quality of the experiences of using any of the options.
I’ve been switching between different LSP implementations for Elixir—ElixirLS, Lexical, next-ls—and have been following Expert for a while. Really looking forward to trying it out!
That said, the only thing that feels a bit off to me is the name “Expert.” It comes across slightly arrogant or presumptuous—like it’s implying it’s the only “expert” in the room. Maybe something more neutral would’ve been better?
Still, excited to see what the official tooling brings!
It's not an AI tool. It's an LSP. It is the expert in the room, because it's not a random word generator, not smart, it just follows the rules that the language has.
How did you find out about it in the first place? I remember seeing the Elixir blog post announcing the LSP project ages ago and then nothing since then.
Do you frequent elixirforum.com? That’s where the elixir community resides. Jose and Chris post frequently there. As well as maintainers of popular libraries.
Oh I'm excited for this. Editor support for elixir has never been quite as good as I'd like. I'm really happy to see they're investing in this - no lang with as consistently great a developer experience as elixir should be without a proper, official, well supported lang server.
Excited to see this after the blog post a year ago – I didn't realize they were working out in the open, because I was wondering how that project was going.
Any news on when we can start to use it in our editors?
I've been using it on Zed since they added support (changed changed my LSP for Elixir to be expert, it autoloaded it). It's been a bit unstable so I'm not surprised you're not seeing anything, you can check the status of running LSPs and restart them manually. I've had to do that too often to like working with it so I plan to switch back and wait a few more weeks to try it again.
As with my comment in another tree, no, none of the Elixir core team or Dashbit employees are directly involved with this effort, though they may be advising informally and will likely submit a PR here and there.
It has both a justfile and a makefile at the root, even. Most of us seem to want to use it to throw make away entirely.
That said, I consider `just` very language-agnostic and useful because of that, and I consider mix pretty bad at any workflow needs that isn't directly concerned with BEAM.
It's not technically a make replacement (make does do things like incremental build management etc.), but it just goes to show how bad the DX of make is.
Woo super excited for this. Is anyone working on the official vscode extension so we don't have to build and hook that up ourselves, or is that up for grabs still?
https://elixir-lang.org/blog/2024/08/15/welcome-elixir-langu...