Its irrelevant how bad it is, jetbrains does benefit from LSPs of other languages (especially new ones), so its only fair they support it and if vscode sucks then people will naturally not use it. It’s fair competition.
It’d be nice to have an official updated response from Jetbrains, as the person who replied last time is no longer in the company. Although their silence says it all I guess…
1 Like
Why can’t the lsp be a product that comes with an intellij license?
Jetbrains gets paid the same but we can choose our own IDE.
And jetbrains probably already has the LSP or something similar, because it’s powering intellij.
That is simply not true. IntelliJ uses its own protocol for language support. It’s specialised and AFAIK more powerful than LSP (as in it has features that aren’t supported by LSP normally).
Don’t forget that IntelliJ Idea (and the Kotlin plugin) is open-source, and so if it did include an LSP that was hidden away, one could easily extract it from the source code and publish it separately.
1 Like
Most LSP implementations for other languages are created and maintained by communities. I don’t think Kotlin is more difficult than Rust, Scala or V. The Kotlin LSP would be fully implemented if it was really needed.
5 Likes
I find it quite surprising that despite many programming languages having Language Server Protocol (LSP) support, Kotlin does not yet have an official LSP implementation. What intrigues me the most is that even Apple has developed an LSP for Swift (see SourceKit-LSP). It’s remarkable to see Swift’s support in this area, yet disappointing that Kotlin lacks a similar tool.
I’ll add to the choir with a different note here:
After recent updates rendered intellij basically unusable (seems like today’s release fixed it, let’s hope) I tried to write the most basic possible LSP for kotlin: hover and go-to definition.
Even that is incredibly, excruciatingly hard. No documentation points to the right place, the PSI abstraction on top of files are barely documented (I had some luck finding an old javadoc page from the 1.0.x era) and even downloading the JARs to navigate is not working properly.
It seems to me that not only Jet Brains doesn’t want to write a LSP server but also actively makes it hard for people to build one.
It is very frustrating, to say the least.
If you’re not willing to provide a LSP, nor support a community-based one, can you at least commit to not breaking the only way people can write code in your language?
Increasingly, LLMs and agents will make use of LSP tools.
Microsoft’s paper on Model-Guided Decoding demonstrates that smaller models with LSP tools can outperform larger models without LSP. Without decent LSP support kotlin developers will be at a disadvantage