> These are two very different tasks quite at odds with each other
Are they? I feel like intellisense is largely a subset of what a compiler already has to do.
I’d say the key features of an LSP are knowing the exact type of all symbols, goto definition, and auto-complete. The compiler has all of that information.
Compilers produce debug symbols which include some of the information you need for intellisense. I wrote a PDB-based LSP server that can goto definition on any function call for any language. Worked surprisingly well.
If you wanted to argue that intellisense is a subset of compiling and it can be done faster and more efficiently I could buy that argument. But if you’re going to declare the tasks are at odds with one another I’d love to hear specific details!
On the efficiency angle, I think a big difficulty here that isn’t often discussed is that many optimization strategies relevant to incremental compilation slow down batch compilation, and vice versa.
For example, arena allocation strategies (i.e internment of identifiers and strings, as well as for allocating AST nodes, etc) is a very effective optimization in batch compilers, as the arenas can live until the end of execution and therefore don’t need “hands on” memory management.
However, this doesn’t work in an incremental environment, as you would quickly fill up the arenas with intermediary data and never be deleting anything from them. This is one reason rust-analyzer reimplements such a vast amount of the rust compiler, which makes heavy use of arenas throughout.
As essentially every programming language developer writes their batch compiler first without worrying about incremental compilation, they can wind up stuck in a situation where there’s simply no way to reuse their existing compiler code for an IDE efficiently. This effect tends to scale with how clever/well-optimized the batch compiler implementation is.
I think the future definitely lies in compilers written to be “incremental first,” but this requires a major shift in mindset, as well as accepting significantly worse performance for batch compilation. It also further complicates the already very complicated task of writing compilers, especially for first-time language designers.
That's a great point about allocation/memory management. As an example, rust-analyzer needs to free memory, but rustc's `free` is simply `std::process::exit`.
> I think the future definitely lies in compilers written to be “incremental first,” but this requires a major shift in mindset, as well as accepting significantly worse performance for batch compilation. It also further complicates the already very complicated task of writing compilers, especially for first-time language designers.
I'm in strong agreement with you, but I will say: I've really grown to love query-based approaches to compiler-shaped problems. Makes some really tricky cache/state issues go away.
> Are they? I feel like intellisense is largely a subset of what a compiler already has to do.
They are distinct! Well, not just intellisense, but pretty much everything. I'll paraphrase this blog post, but the best way to think about think about the difference between a traditional compiler and an IDE is that compilers are top-down (e.g, you start compiling a program from a compilation unit's entrypoint, a `lib.rs` or `main.rs` in Rust), but IDEs are cursor-centric—they're trying to compile/analyze the minimal amount of code necessary to understand the program. After all, the best way to go fast is to avoid unnecessary work!
> If you wanted to argue that intellisense is a subset of compiling and it can be done faster and more efficiently I could buy that argument. But if you’re going to declare the tasks are at odds with one another I’d love to hear specific details!
Beyond the philosophical/architectural difference I mentioned above, compilers typically have a one-way mapping between syntax and mapping, but to support things like refactors or assists, you often need to do the opposite: go from semantics to syntax. For instance, if you want to refactor from struct to an enum, you often need to find all instances of said struct, make the semantic change, then construct the new syntax tree from the semantics. For simple transformations like a struct to an enum, a purely syntax-based based approach might work (albeit, at the cost of accuracy if you have two structs with same name), but you start to run into issues when you consider traits, interfaces (for example: think about how a type implements an interface in Go!), or generics.
It doesn't really make sense for a compiler to support above use cases, but they're are _foundational_ to an IDE. However, if a compiler is query-centric (as rustc is), then it's pretty feasible for rustc and rust-analyzer to share, for instance, the trait solver or the borrow checker (we're planning/scoping work on the former right now).
Are they? I feel like intellisense is largely a subset of what a compiler already has to do.
I’d say the key features of an LSP are knowing the exact type of all symbols, goto definition, and auto-complete. The compiler has all of that information.
Compilers produce debug symbols which include some of the information you need for intellisense. I wrote a PDB-based LSP server that can goto definition on any function call for any language. Worked surprisingly well.
If you wanted to argue that intellisense is a subset of compiling and it can be done faster and more efficiently I could buy that argument. But if you’re going to declare the tasks are at odds with one another I’d love to hear specific details!