Support Language Server Protocol

[lscoughlin]

Why not support the Language Server Protocol? It gets you a bunch of the boring but important stuff quickly.

[andydotxyz]

I cannot see a C implementation of the language server on their list. If you know of a library that we can plug in that would be great.

[lscoughlin]

There are multiple:

• this one From the clang folks.
• this one from the cquery folks
• this one from which forks from cquery.

These links come from the community site

[andydotxyz]

Hmm, they all look like C++.
Maybe we can access the APIs from our pure C code, I would have to investigate further.

[lscoughlin]

Ah - I see what you mean. LSP breaks down into client and server implementations - so you actually run the server in a separate process and talk to it with jsonrpc, which is less inefficient then it sounds.

[andydotxyz]

I don't really want to package a C++ build into our C based IDE - hence why I think we need to find a C implementation of the server. Or is the server shipped separately in a system package manager and run in the background?

[lscoughlin]

clangd is shipped separately and available on most distros, the cquery based solutions you might have to build and be thoughtful about but they provide greater speed a little more functionality.

And in either case, you would be running the lsp-server in the background and interacting with it as a client.