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Comment by jesseryoung | Hacker News Reader

I have been following this extension ever since Don Jayamanne joined Microsoft. This has grown by leaps and bounds since then and is a fantastic extension.

I was a little leary when I learned they were tossing out jedi in favor of the VS Python language server. However, after playing with it for a month or so now I can tell that it's a drastic improvement over what's currently in place.

If anybody from the MS team is watching this thread, care to share why you chose to invest in the VS Language Server instead of investing in Jedi further?

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The key thing to know is that the Microsoft Python Language Server -- long, official name I know, hence why we just call it MPLS internally ;) -- comes from our Python workload for Visual Studio. It was an extremely tough call to make because David Halter has done a great job with Jedi and running that project. But in the end we decided that if we were going to need to keep the IntelliSense engine in Visual Studio going then we should get more out of that investment by turning it into a language server and making it available in VS Code.

But I will say (and continue to say) that we are extremely grateful to David Halter and everyone who has worked on Jedi. It gave the extension the initial IntelliSense support it needed in order to be successful. And we currently have no plans on removing Jedi support for those that prefer it (from the extension's perspective we're actually trying to treat the language server as yet another project we have integrated support for, but where we have a direct line to when a bug or feature crops up that we would like to see addressed ;) .

The server is more tech agnostic : you can use it even if you IDE is not written in python. But the killer feature is that the protocol is the same for all languages so once you support it for one language, you gain support for all of them.

Jedi provides completions. LS has much wider capabilities - formatting, code rename/refactoring, detecting unused or missing imports, discovering unit tests, linting as you type (so you don't have to run PyLint manually) and more.

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