Comment by ChadNauseam
10 hours ago
I think it's a bit apples and oranges. I was suggesting that compilation itself should probably not involve nondeterministic network requests. If I understand LSP correctly, it only uses network requests to allow your editor to communicate with a binary that provides type information. But the compiler behavior is unchanged. Honestly LSPs seem pretty reasonable to me.
What's the fundamental difference between a syntax highlighter and the frontend of a compiler? I would argue not much, apart from the fact that people are willing to have their syntax highlighter randomly explode, but are much more concerned about their compiler randomly exploding.
A compiler is allowed to halt on a syntax error. Syntax highlighters ideally should not give up on colouring the rest of the document due to mismatched parentheses (or braces or any other delimiter pair).
Fair point
The fundamental difference is that in his case any conforming compiler has to do the network request. Whereas with LSP it's just an implementation detail of the editor.
My point is "why do we tolerate network requests in LSPs, but not compiler frontends"?
If you think about it, the LSP is a way of doing libraries, which is dramatically worse than just inventing a binary interface and doing actual dynamic libraries.
If you follow the LSP model to it's natural conclusion, everything becomes this horrible, disconnected morass of servers talking to each other on your local machine..
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