How LSP could have been better

Does anyone know why LSP uses UTF-16 for encoding columns? It seems like everyone agrees it is a bad choice, so I'm curious about the original reasoning. Are there any benefits at all to using UTF-16, or was it something to do with Microsoft legacy code?

Re: How LSP could have been better

#5

Post by duxup » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 3:40 AM UTC

warble wrote: post #2

What the hell is LSP?

https://microsoft.github.io/language-server-protocol/

Re: How LSP could have been better

#6

Post by teraflop » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 3:40 AM UTC

warble wrote: post #2

What the hell is LSP?

If you click the "Why LSP?" link in the first sentence of the article, or type "lsp" into Google, you'll get your answer:

> The Language Server Protocol (LSP) defines the protocol used between an editor or IDE and a language server that provides language features like auto complete, go to definition, find all references etc.

Re: How LSP could have been better

#7

Post by raincole » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 3:40 AM UTC

Recently I stumbled upon this issue:

https://github.com/joaotavora/eglot/discussions/1127

I don't know enough about emacs and LSP to see the full picture, but it seems that both eglot's and corfu's maintainers, assumably very competent programmers, can't find a solution for this.

I only skimmed the thread. My understanding is that LSP dumps a long list of completion candidates at once and they can't decide a cache strategy that works well with existing code...? If someone who know more about this please enlighten us.

Re: How LSP could have been better

#8

Post by slimsag » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 3:43 AM UTC

zyedidia wrote: post #4

Does anyone know why LSP uses UTF-16 for encoding columns? It seems like everyone agrees it is a bad choice, so I'm curious about the original reasoning. Are there any benefits at all to using UTF-16, or was it something to do with Microsoft legacy code?

JavaScript uses UTF-16 for everything is why, and LSP is a TypeScript-first protocol.

Re: How LSP could have been better

#9

Post by everyone » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 3:43 AM UTC

warble wrote: post #2

What the hell is LSP?

Lumpy Space Princess

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Adventure_Time_charact...

Re: How LSP could have been better

#10

Post by hgs3 » Thu, Oct 12, 2023, 3:46 AM UTC

zyedidia wrote: post #4

Does anyone know why LSP uses UTF-16 for encoding columns? It seems like everyone agrees it is a bad choice, so I'm curious about the original reasoning. Are there any benefits at all to using UTF-16, or was it something to do with Microsoft legacy code?

There was a lengthy discussion on this [1]. UTF-16 was used because it was convenient: it's what Microsoft API's and JavaScript already use (the latter being the language VS Code is written in).

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/language-server-protocol/issues...