Nadeeshaan Gunasinghe - Language Server Protocol and Implementation: Supporting Language-Smart Editing and Programming Tools

This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress Media, LLC part of Springer Nature.

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The Language Server Protocol (LSP) has been one of the most talked about topics during the past few years when it comes to the tooling for programming languages. With the advancement of the developer tools and the programming languages, developers started to rely more and more on advanced tools and enhanced language services. When we consider one of the most focused branches of developer tools which is IDEs and text editors, there are many vendors who have released various editing tools in the past couple of decades. When we consider the number of programming languages along with the number of smart editors nowadays, in order to support language intelligence among the editors, these vendors have to repeat the same thing. The Language Server Protocol was introduced to solve this particular problem, and today it has become the norm of the development tools language intelligence provider. By adopting the LSP, tools such as text editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) could expand the capabilities and avoid the users burden of switching between the development tools for trying new programming languages and frameworks.

This book is for the developers who are passionate about developing programming language tools. In this book, we provide the readers a comprehensive understanding about the Language Server Protocol and how to develop a Language Server from scratch. The readers will be guided with code samples to provide a better understanding about the server implementation by adhering to the user experience best practices as well as the LSP best practices. The readers are expected to use the book along with the example implementation, in order to get a better understanding about the concepts described in the book. In the example implementation, the book refers to VS Code as the client; however, the readers can use any other client and integrate the server implementation as desired.

The chapters of the book have been ordered to capture various aspects of the developer experience when it comes to the programming language tooling, and the LSP operations and features are categorized under these aspects. The readers are not overwhelmed by including the code snippets of the data structures in the LSP and it is recommended to refer to the official documentation of the Language Server Protocol for the data structures.

We would first like to thank Jonathan Gennick, Assistant Editorial Director at Apress, for evaluating and accepting our proposal for this book. We would also like to thank Laura Berendson, Development Editor at Apress, and Nirmal Selvaraj, Project Coordinator, for guiding us toward the end. Andres Sacco served as the Technical Reviewer. Thank you, Andres, for making sure we did our best.

Kasun Indrasiri, Software Architect and author of Microservices for the Enterprise and GRPC: Up and Running, inspired us to work on this book and mentored us throughout the process. We are eternally grateful to Kasun Indrasiri for the guidance and support.

Finally, we would like to thank our families and parents as, without them, none of our life achievements would be possible.