Adding features like auto complete, go to definition, or documentation on hover for a programming language takes significant effort. Traditionally this work had to be repeated for each development tool, as each tool provides different APIs for implementing the same feature.
A Language Server is meant to provide the language-specific smarts and communicate with development tools over a protocol that enables inter-process communication.
The idea behind the Language Server Protocol (LSP) is to standardize the protocol for how such servers and development tools communicate. This way, a single Language Server can be re-used in multiple development tools, which in turn can support multiple languages with minimal effort.
We only support the bare minimum LSP features:
- Provide completion for the names of all standard-library functions.
- Shows information on standard-library functions, on hover.
To use our LSP implementation you'll need to configure your editor, IDE, or environment appropriately. Configuration will vary depending on what you're using.
Typically configuration will involve at least:
- Specifying the type of files that hould use LSP (i.e. a filename suffixes).
- Specifying the name/arguments to use for the LSP server.
For our implementation you'll need to launch "yal -lsp" to startup the LSP-process.
For GNU Emacs the following file should provide all the help you need:
Create the file ~/.config/nvim/init.lua with contents as below:
Here we see what completion might look like:
Here's our help-text being displayed on-hover:
Here's the same again, using neovim:
As stated above we only support hover-text, and completion, from the standard library. Supporting the users' own code is harder because that would involve evaluating it - and that might cause side-effects.
It should be noted that our completion-support is very naive - it literally returns the names of all available methods, and relies upon the editor to narrow down the selection - that seems to work though.
- README.md
- More details of the project.
- PRIMITIVES.md
- The list of built-in functions, whether implemented in Golang or YAL.
- INTRODUCTION.md
- Getting started setting variables, defining functions, etc.