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Comment by tvanantwerp | Hacker News Reader

> [Utilize] the power of language servers to provide deep syntactical analysis of your code and projects.

Having my code analyzed by others' servers just so I can have better autocomplete does not sound like something I want.

Language servers are local services that analyze the code outside of your editor (and can be used by several editors etc). It's a protocol that got big the last 2 years or so.

It doesn't refer to servers in some Cloud.

So... daemons?

yes. They are deamons which are spawned by the editor and which are running locally on the machine. The daemons are reapsonsible for analyzing code in the edited project and to provide IDE-like features (auto-completion, refactorings, etc.) around it. The editor talks to the daemon (language-service) through an RPC protocol (language server protocol).

yes and no? Unlike a traditional daemon, this isn't a system service that always runs in the background.

The IDE (in this case atom) spins up the process and shuts it down when necessary, and then both sides communicate to each other using an implementation-defined IPC mechanism.

So it's a server more in the sense that the IDE requests info as a client, and then the server provides it (pull, not push).

So it's not a daemon or a server. It's just a process. Running some code in a separate process isn't a 'server' it's just how all programmes operate.

In computing, a server is a computer program or a device that provides functionality for other programs or devices, called "clients".

across a network in modern parlance

You seem confused as to what a server is.

If a program runs in a separate process and provides data/processing to other connected programs through some standard protocols, they are a server.

The servers run entirely locally on your machine.

They run on your own machine, and it's used by many other editors. The spec is by Microsoft and supported by Emacs and other editors, it's not perfected yet, but it works pretty well.

They mean the local language server/interpreter, I think.

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