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Comment by cosmic_cheese | Hacker News Reader

It’s nice that a Swift LSP exists, is supported by the company behind the language, and is actively being worked on, because that makes it much more feasible to do things like build alternative IDEs.

Contrast this to Kotlin, which doesn’t have an LSP due to conflicts of interest with Jetbrains’ business. You either use a Jetbrains IDE or you don’t write Kotlin.

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This and the whole anti-Java attitude on Android circles is what made me disregard Kotlin, how can one be so out of touch with what makes their ecosystem possible in first place.

Well, for Android specifically I’m not sure anti-Java sentiment is necessarily entirely unjustified with how Android tends to be stuck on some ancient version, and it’s not as if the JVM ecosystem doesn’t have its warts (though those are largely shared by Kotlin).

Which is made on purpose to sell Kotlin on the platform, those having had this decision are part of the same anti-Java group I was mentioning, as per remarks on podcasts and other appearances.

What about this? https://github.com/fwcd/kotlin-language-server

It’s wholly a community effort and not supported by Jetbrains, which means it will always be at a disadvantage. Even development on it continues, it’ll always be a few steps behind the current version of Kotlin and will probably be missing a number of things compared to the autocomplete in Jetbrains IDEs.

It’s also built on the internal APIs of the Kotlin compiler, which are subject to change at any time. If Jetbrains shifts those around too dramatically it could break the LSP beyond the point that anybody is willing to repair it.

For corporate-developed languages first party LSPs are important.

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