If that was the point, it'd be a wrong point. The connections would not be small. They would be small on the 30,000-foot view, but up close at the implementatio

If that was the point, it'd be a wrong point. The connections would not be small. They would be small on the 30,000-foot view, but up close at the implementation level each and every one of them would come with a crapton of assumptions about how they operation that would at times require architectural changes to the editor to work. This one "helpfully" works based on the files on the disk. That one connects via Protocol Buffers. Each of course have their own set of error messages and a protocol to implement. Whoops, this one is more synchronous than I thought. Whoops, the way this one works conflicts with my incremental compile feature. Crap, this one turns out to implicitly require a certain threading model. Oh dear, this one wants a stream of every keystroke made, but that one wants the entire file sent over when we want to run an analysis. Aw heck, our IDE model requires the whole file to be sent over for incremental analysis but doing that six times a second kills my whole dev machine, and doing it not six times a second makes the latency intolerably slow compared to our current custom implementation for our dominant language. The original NxM problem is that each language needed support per editor and each editor required support per langauge. While "each language writes one custom server" and "each editor has to support each language's custom protocol" would still be an improvement, it wouldn't be enough of one. Now, the idea that an editor can just implement this protocol and magically all the unicorns start singing in unison is a pipe dream as well. But what it does is make something that is completely infeasible for even a well-funded commercial team into something that some new little open source editor can afford to start doing. Support for Haskell may be a bit rough until someone wants to use Haskell in that editor and can fix the editor support for Haskell specifically, because of this quirk and that quirk and the other quirk (the quirks will always be with us), but at least it's in the realm of possibility now instead of a ludicrous pie-in-the-sky idea.