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Comment by OJFord | Hacker News Reader

> We offer plugins and extensions for IntelliJ, Visual Studio Code and Neovim, with Language Server Protocol support coming soon.

Why? Why would they not have just done the language server first (or only)? All of those have built-in support for it, so separate implementations wouldn't have been necessary; that's the point.

I just don't understand why you'd make that decision on a greenfield project today, especially if LSP support is planned at all?

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Probably because JetBrains only recently added native LSP to IntelliJ[0] etc.

Given that writing anything in Java/Kotlin basically requires the use of IntelliJ, it’s not really surprising that a language built on top of Truffle and GraalVM, all Java technologies, would ship with an IntelliJ plugin, _but not_ an LSP. Because such an LSP would have been useless in the primary IDE used by the language developers.

So if you wanna blame anyone, blame JetBrains for deliberately making hard to use LSPs with their IDE. Presumably to build a moat around their plugin ecosystem.

[0] https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2023/07/lsp-for-plugin-d...

The experience with LSPs is quite underwhelming compared to what a native language plugin in IntelliJ can do. That isn’t to say the approach is bad, but it’s definitely a trade off.

How come? I don't know anything in say, pycharm, that can't be done with a LSP server and plugins. But that's probably because I don't know enough so I'm curious about what limitations an LSP would involve!

Refactorings are one example where LSP can’t match IntelliJ. A language server also takes far more skill and effort to implement than the equivalent IntelliJ plugin, where much of the heavy lifting is done by the IntelliJ framework. And you still need at least a lightweight plugin for each supported editor. That’s why a language server isn’t necessarily the best place to start but hard to avoid in the long run.

Why assume it's a greenfield project? I would think most open source software that comes out of companies have lived internally for a while before going public?

Fair point.

This. I’m willing to bet I talked to one of the people who use this internally at Apple a few years back when I interviewed there (before they decided to do away with remote hires). They didn’t mention it, but it fits the context.

Yes, I was using it when I joined Apple in mid 2020

Don't leave is hanging, how was your experience?

(Pkl, not Apple :p)

I absolutely loved it and I’ve been extremely impatient to see its release. I used it to generate k8s manifests, Terraform, all infra config files. Very flexible and fun to use

Do you know of any public resources about it's use cases?, other than the one linked in this submission of course.

What bout Pkl made it easier to write Terraform/K8s manifests/etc.?

I looked around and couldn't make sense of how to write out random config files like I manage with puppet and ERB files.

Are there any reasonable examples of such?

Additionally I cant think of other such projects from Apple. They tend to build things that get used extensively till the end of their life is consumed.

I wish Apple would continue to open source much more. Especially old software much like Microsoft does. I would kind of enjoy a Linux Distro that can natively run old Apple software and tools.

Clang leaps to mind. Most of LLVM was developed under Apple's auspices, although the project predates Apple hiring Chris Latner. Swift is also open source, although in practice it's almost always used in a macOS context. Which I think is a shame, it's a great language for writing the sorts of servers for which people usually reach for Go.

That's not a complete list of programs Apple has open-sourced, although clearly open-source software isn't what they're best known for. But clang alone is a worthy contribution which deserves to be recognized.

FoundationDB was open sourced a few years after they bought it too.

>I just don't understand why you'd make that decision on a greenfield project today, especially if LSP support is planned at all?

How about if the LSP doesn't cut it for the kind of they IDE support they want to offer?

Well I suppose that's what I'm asking, is that the case? I'm not aware of other projects that have a separate plug-in due to LSP shortcomings, so just interested if there is something they're doing that's not possible/won't be in the LSP one.

I think the answer to your question is yes: LSPs can’t do everything that a plugin can do.

https://blog.jetbrains.com/platform/2023/07/lsp-for-plugin-d...

That sounds like a limitation on Jetbrains part, no? Or is it due to LSPs themselves?

I suppose there are things which are just beyond the scope of LSP, like menus and other UI bits which are IDE specific, not to mention refactoring tools etc.

That would be on the client (the LSP support in the specific IDE) to implement though, and would then work for any language server that implemented those capabilities?

Like 'go to definition' or whatever is surely in every IDEs menu, but it can be done with LSP.

Pkl has been widely used at Apple for years. It is not a greenfield project.

When distributing LSP servers you need to compile them to the target platform. Afterwards you normally also need an extension or plugin to actually activate the LSP server. So it is possible that there is an LSP server, but they haven’t figured out the distribution yet (sharing binaries? Homebrew?).

have you worked with ide native extensions? while LSP is useful, his expressiveness and power and integration is limited.

I can imagine the answer if I were in their shoes. Say I already have something working as a plugin (or know how to make plugins vs. learning from scratch about implementing LSP), I'd rather have this out there as soon as possible and add more tooling/language support in subsequent releases.

If it was just one I would have assumed the same, but Intellij, VSCode, and Neovim..?

From https://pkl-lang.org/blog/introducing-pkl.html#editor-suppor...:

"We are also releasing two other plugins: our VS Code plugin, and our neovim plugin. Today, these plugins only provide basic editing features like syntax highlighting and code folding."

Language Server support isn't nearly as good as building a native plugin for the IDE.

Because the current extensions only provide syntax highlighting. The Neovim one uses tree-sitter which is built into NVim.

LSPs in vscode suck

Can you elaborate please? VSCode is literally the reason why LSP even exists

They turn your IDE into a distributed system with parsing and serializing overhead for every action.

Isn't that true for any editor with LSP support though, not just VSCode? And I personally consider that to be much better than the alternative solution of re-writing parts of the compiler to a different language to integrate them into the editor directly, like JetBrains does.

I was wrong. I meant Treesitter sucks in vscode

VSCode doesn't support tree-sitter at all, it doesn't "suck", it just doesn't exist

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