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I see what you're saying... most people writing LSPs for new languages are doing it for the first time. They may spend a lot of time doing it and it will never

by brabel 3y ago

I see what you're saying... most people writing LSPs for new languages are doing it for the first time. They may spend a lot of time doing it and it will never be very good because they just don't really know what it takes. It's like that for any area of programming. What I am saying is that I think it's a huge effort exactly because of that: how many people have written an LSP before and are willing to do it for a new language? The fact that Jetbrains was actually behind rust-analyzer is actually news to me, despite having had exchanges with you before as a user of Rust IntelliJ for several years - I though you were "independent" of Jetbrains. That explains how it got so good so fast :D though I am very surprised a junior dev pulled it off... I suppose there was lots of "support" from the more experienced people, specially regarding the architecture, which I believe is what you're saying made it even possible? Anyway, great job on the Rust plugin, I've always used that and it was always solid... though now I am "migrating" (at least trying to) to Kate and using rust-analyzer via the LSP just because JetBrains has "deprecated" the Rust plugin in favour of the new Rust-specific IDE they're cooking up (as I'm sure you're aware). I also contributed to the emacs plugin (rustic) before but got a bit disillusioned with emacs performance :) small world. I guess Rust would've been successful (because of its own merits as a language) even if its IDE story was as bad as other new languages normally are (and eventually, because of many people having interest in it, the situation would improve fast), but maybe I'm wrong and the existence of rust-analyzer and RLS before that did actually "cause" the success... I don't think it's completely clear which is the case, and perhaps you're a bit biased in this story (no offense).

matklad 3y ago
>The fact that Jetbrains was actually behind rust-analyzer To clarify, I was not working at JetBrains when I started to work on rust-analyzer, so they are not _directly_ behind. They are very much indirectly behind though, as - JetBrains was funding a lot of educational projects for students of software engineering, such as myself. - JetBrains generally pioneered modern static analysis based IDEs: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/PostIntelliJ.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/PostIntelliJ.html - Most of things I've learned about IDEs, I learned at JB, studying their open source tools - I was able to spend a year hacking on rust-analyzer for free due to my savings from the work at JetBrains - And, after those funds run out, I worked part time in the educational department of JB, teaching students algorithms, Python, and Rust > I suppose there was lots of "support" from the more experienced people, specially regarding the architecture, which I believe is what you're saying made it even possible? Not really, in a sense that I didn't have a dedicated mentor to check on me on a daily basis, but also such support is not really needed. You are writing a plugin, so the overall architecture is a given, and you just fill in the details. And most of the things you need you can learn from the docs and source code of existing plugins, and that also retroactively explains the overall architecture to you. So, by the time I started hacking on rust-analyzer, the core "throughput-vs-latency" tradeoff was clear to me, and, after taking an extra look at dart-analyzer, roslyn, and Swift libsyntax all pieces fell into place. It's a shame of course that there's no single "IDE book", and you really need to dig into the source and uncover the knowledge, but that's why `https://rust-analyzer.github.io/blog https://rust-analyzer.github.io/blog` exists! >I guess Rust would've been successful (because of its own merits as a language) even if its IDE story was as bad as other new languages normally are (and eventually, because of many people having interest in it, the situation would improve fast), but maybe I'm wrong and the existence of rust-analyzer and RLS before that did actually "cause" the success... Yeah, it's hard to untangle these! I would say these all were mutually reinforcing: fundamentals of language design screaming "this _could_ be big if it doesn't fail", people getting excited about Rust early on and hacking on the language and associated tooling, the tooling making it pleasant to actually use the language, people getting excited about using Rust to do stuff and increasing the size of the ecosystem (which directly defines the amount of funding available). The bottom turtle is maybe Graydon engineering the best language-design-and-implementation team in the world?

by brabel 3y ago

matklad 3y ago

>The fact that Jetbrains was actually behind rust-analyzer To clarify, I was not working at JetBrains when I started to work on rust-analyzer, so they are not _directly_ behind. They are very much indirectly behind though, as - JetBrains was funding a lot of educational projects for students of software engineering, such as myself. - JetBrains generally pioneered modern static analysis based IDEs: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/PostIntelliJ.html https://martinfowler.com/bliki/PostIntelliJ.html - Most of things I've learned about IDEs, I learned at JB, studying their open source tools - I was able to spend a year hacking on rust-analyzer for free due to my savings from the work at JetBrains - And, after those funds run out, I worked part time in the educational department of JB, teaching students algorithms, Python, and Rust > I suppose there was lots of "support" from the more experienced people, specially regarding the architecture, which I believe is what you're saying made it even possible? Not really, in a sense that I didn't have a dedicated mentor to check on me on a daily basis, but also such support is not really needed. You are writing a plugin, so the overall architecture is a given, and you just fill in the details. And most of the things you need you can learn from the docs and source code of existing plugins, and that also retroactively explains the overall architecture to you. So, by the time I started hacking on rust-analyzer, the core "throughput-vs-latency" tradeoff was clear to me, and, after taking an extra look at dart-analyzer, roslyn, and Swift libsyntax all pieces fell into place. It's a shame of course that there's no single "IDE book", and you really need to dig into the source and uncover the knowledge, but that's why `https://rust-analyzer.github.io/blog https://rust-analyzer.github.io/blog` exists! >I guess Rust would've been successful (because of its own merits as a language) even if its IDE story was as bad as other new languages normally are (and eventually, because of many people having interest in it, the situation would improve fast), but maybe I'm wrong and the existence of rust-analyzer and RLS before that did actually "cause" the success... Yeah, it's hard to untangle these! I would say these all were mutually reinforcing: fundamentals of language design screaming "this _could_ be big if it doesn't fail", people getting excited about Rust early on and hacking on the language and associated tooling, the tooling making it pleasant to actually use the language, people getting excited about using Rust to do stuff and increasing the size of the ecosystem (which directly defines the amount of funding available). The bottom turtle is maybe Graydon engineering the best language-design-and-implementation team in the world?