Apple's investment into Clangd and refactoring tooling • Hacker News Board

Re: Apple's investment into Clangd and refactoring tooling

#31

Post by icholy » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:14 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #21

JDevlieghere wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly this. If you have 3 different editors and 3 different languages, you potentially end up with 9 different implementation. LSP means that the same can be achieved by one implementation per language and one plugin per editor.

With LSP, you end up with one subpar implementation, and you need to duplicate all refactoring functionality for each language. While with common IDE plugins, you have one implementation of the refactoring functionality, and each language plugin just exposes an AST. So LSP actually leads to more duplicated code and worse editors. VS Code will never be able to match the functionality of IDEA unless each language serve…

Oh, you're right. We should just dump all other editors and use IDEA. /s

Re: Apple's investment into Clangd and refactoring tooling

#32

Post by solarexplorer » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:14 PM UTC

vhbit wrote: post #3

I hope that it also means there will be Apple-provided LSP server for Swift soon.

There is one already: SourceKit http://www.jpsim.com/uncovering-sourcekit/

Re: Apple's investment into Clangd and refactoring tooling

#33

Post by azinman2 » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:16 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #21

JDevlieghere wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly this. If you have 3 different editors and 3 different languages, you potentially end up with 9 different implementation. LSP means that the same can be achieved by one implementation per language and one plugin per editor.

With LSP, you end up with one subpar implementation, and you need to duplicate all refactoring functionality for each language. While with common IDE plugins, you have one implementation of the refactoring functionality, and each language plugin just exposes an AST. So LSP actually leads to more duplicated code and worse editors. VS Code will never be able to match the functionality of IDEA unless each language serve…

Can you go into more detail please on why it had to be subpar?

Re: Apple's investment into Clangd and refactoring tooling

#34

Post by icholy » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:21 PM UTC

fowl2 wrote: post #8

I'm assuming this is the "LSP" discussed? https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ Mapping json-rpc onto xpc... Sure why not

He said that's an intermediate step so that they can get to testing faster.

Re: Apple's investment into Clangd and refactoring tooling

#35

Post by verroq » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:26 PM UTC

kuschku wrote: post #21

JDevlieghere wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, exactly this. If you have 3 different editors and 3 different languages, you potentially end up with 9 different implementation. LSP means that the same can be achieved by one implementation per language and one plugin per editor.

With LSP, you end up with one subpar implementation, and you need to duplicate all refactoring functionality for each language. While with common IDE plugins, you have one implementation of the refactoring functionality, and each language plugin just exposes an AST. So LSP actually leads to more duplicated code and worse editors. VS Code will never be able to match the functionality of IDEA unless each language serve…

Technically solvable if somebody writes a LSP proxy server that merges together backends.

Re: Apple's investment into Clangd and refactoring tooling

#36

Post by fokinsean » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

fowl2 wrote: post #8

I'm assuming this is the "LSP" discussed? https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ Mapping json-rpc onto xpc... Sure why not

Woah I had never seen this before. That's really cool. So in theory you can make your own editor and provide a ton of IDE-like features by communicating with this server?

Are there any other implementations of LSP by other orgs?

Re: Apple's investment into Clangd and refactoring tooling

#37

Post by DannyBee » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:46 PM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #4

I'm glad to see that Apple is putting work into making their tooling better and easier to work with, but I'm still not clear on the benefits of this change. Would someone care to enlighten me? Currently, the benefits of libclang that I see are that I can easily drop it into a project without requiring a lot of dependencies, and I don't need to figure out how to get permission to run different processes and manage int…

Just to clear what seems to be some confusion in what you wrote:

Clangd already exists (it was contributed and mainly maintained by Google, IIRC), and works great. It supports LSP, and works fine with vscode.

What apple is investing in is making it their default tooling.

So the benefits of this change are exclusive to apple xcode (ATM) :)

The benefits to using clangd in general are (among poher things) editor agnosticism and scaling.

If everyone uses libclang, libclang must scale to every codebase (or a least, the interface, and then you'd have to replace/relink it).

If everyone uses LSP, you just need something that speaks LSP, and scales to your codebase.

At the scale of Google's codebases, for example, the first is untenable, the second is doable.

Re: Apple's investment into Clangd and refactoring tooling

#38

Post by DannyBee » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

flamedoge wrote: post #20

I tried building Clangd in trunk but failed to build.

We build and use it every day, so ... report it on the list?

Re: Apple's investment into Clangd and refactoring tooling

#39

Post by evmar » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:50 PM UTC

fokinsean wrote: post #36

fowl2 wrote: post #8

I'm assuming this is the "LSP" discussed? https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/ Mapping json-rpc onto xpc... Sure why not

Woah I had never seen this before. That's really cool. So in theory you can make your own editor and provide a ton of IDE-like features by communicating with this server? Are there any other implementations of LSP by other orgs?

https://langserver.org/

Re: Apple's investment into Clangd and refactoring tooling

#40

Post by DannyBee » Thu, Apr 19, 2018, 2:52 PM UTC

So, just because there seems to be confusion:

Clangd already exists. It already supports LSP. It is already part of the llvm project. It was written by !Apple, and used by a wide number of people.

(I want to make sure these people still get credit, i already see people in this thread thanking apple for supporting LSP, which is not actually what happened).

What apple has proposed contributing is: Making clangd work with xcode, and extensions to LSP.

This is great (as long as the second ends up standardized over time).

But the benefits people listed here so far already exist in clangd. The main benefit to work is "xcode support" and "better refactoring" which is awesome :)