Can we get the IDE for free, too? What do we need for full IDE Integration for Truffle Languages?

[Stefan Marr]

Hi Jaroslav:

> On 17 Aug 2016, at 13:02, Jaroslav Tulach <jaroslav.tulach at oracle.com> wrote:
> 
> Nice. What are the next steps? Here are those that I have in mind:
> 
> == Implement Language Server Protocol ==
> 
> Having a trivial implementation of https://github.com/Microsoft/language-server-protocol/ in graal would be natural start, right?

Well, I guess one would need to decide what the minimal set of functionality would be that is useful.
And, then I’d say one would need the Truffle support for the non-execution related information.

> It would give IDEs 
> something to connect to and display. I know you can get some structural info 
> about SOM programs that could be used for code completion. Having that working 
> could inspire other people to join.

Yeah, well, so the thing is that one would need to find language-agnostic notions that make sense and perhaps define some general adapters that can be used to access the language-specific information/data structures, for instance for class structure, methods, etc.


> == Generate Java API for the Language Server Protocol ==
> 
> I could probably generate Java API bindings for the protocol, so we don't have 
> to write that by hand and update everytime the protocol evolves. There is 
> [TypeScript to Java transpiler](https://dukescript.com/update/2016/07/01/
> transcript-to-java.html) and this could be a nice test.

There’s also ls-api, which I have been using: https://github.com/TypeFox/ls-api
But it’s somewhat heavy on library dependencies.

> == Use Language Server Protocol in NetBeans ==
> 
> I know guys in NetBeans who work on the editor infrastructure and could call 
> the protocol and display the necessary information in the IDE.

There’s also the start for Eclipse support: https://github.com/eclipselabs/eclipse-language-service ;)

Best regards
Stefan

-- 
Stefan Marr
Johannes Kepler Universität Linz
http://stefan-marr.de/research/