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0 pointsdodomodo10mo ago0 comments

1. True, but in practice it's not always the case, for example older versions of resharper sometimes slowed down typing speed. It's much harder to fuck it up when there is a network request in the middle.

2. What about languages like Java and Go?

3. a. The experience of lsp server crashing is much better than an editor crashing, the editor usually automatically restart it. I had lsp servers crash without me noticing at all.

b. Memory problems in both lsp servers and traditional IDE analysis are extremely common in my experience. It seem to me that the problem is that there are a lot of pathological cases where the analysis enters a loop and keeps allocating memory.

4. When mixing runtimes I actually find it easier to have multiple processes because I can attach a specialized debugger to each process but this is definitely an important point.

5. good counter argument, I retract my point

6. what I meant is that for very large code bases it can be beneficial to run a central lsp server that many people can connect to because most of the index is shared between all of them and the parsing+indexing itself is very costly. I heard Google were doing something like that but I don't have more information.

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jesse__10mo ago

1. Choosing a shitty architecture to absorb the downside of low quality tools seems like a bad decision, but I guess that's just where the industry's at right now.

2. AFAIK Go can both compile and load DLLs now. A language that doesn't have native compilation facilities (Java, JS, python, etc) would have to have extra tooling that loads the runtime and program from a DLL. A quick google search tells me Java has this tooling already. I'm sure other languages would too.

3 a,b. See point 1.

4. Yeah, that's fair, although I'd probably still rather have a single process.

6. Also a good point. Might be a useful paradigm for large codebases. Although at that point the usage pattern is so different that the calculus for choosing the architecture is different, and I stand by my choice. Google can afford to build fancy shit for themselves.

dodomodoOP10mo ago

first of all I want to say that I have a lot fun talking to you! Honestly I would also prefer dll based approach, if you really want to see the limits of the architecture of Lsp I recommend you to read the discussion about adding syntax highlighting to the protocol, but I see why the people behind LSP did what they did.

One final point!

I think there is a difference between absorbing low quality tools and absorbing low quality code. I think that it makes a lot of sense for a plugin system to design for low quality plugins. I have two examples from my job, the first is a micro services based parsing infrastructure, where each team is responsible with parsing it's own formats, which are oftentimes layered apon formats parsed by different teams. I believe this takes about 10x-100x more resources than it should, but it has the benefit that a rouge parser can't takes everything down with it. The second example is internal scripting capability of a different system where a lot of work was done to make sure the script can't do anything stupid.

In both of those cases the system is designed for low quality code because it is more cost effective to make sure code can be low quality without affecting the overall system, than to make sure low quality code doesn't exists.

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