[cfe-dev] CLangD + Eclipse Che

[Tyler Jewell via cfe-dev]

Hello clang devs:

Per this message sent a few days ago:
http://lists.llvm.org/pipermail/cfe-dev/2017-January/052509.html

I am project lead for Eclipse Che - a developer workspace server and cloud
IDE, which forms the basis of Codenvy. We did work with Microsoft and Red
Hat to get the language server protocol announced last June. We had
originally implemented a similar, but different protocol within Eclipse IDE
and Eclipse Che. Our protocol was so similar to Microsoft's that we agreed
to consolidate around a common one. We've been fortunate to see traction
with 20 or so languages providing adapters.

We have received many customer (and end user) requests for a clang language
server. It's (by far) the most requested feature we get. As soon as you
have runnable prototypes for the implementation, we would like to have
engineers get it packaged as a Che agent, which is how the language server
gets deployed into workspaces that have c/c++ project types. Once packaged
as an agent, then any browser running Che will have intellisense
capabilities that match the language server protocol features implemented.
Che provides a standard wrapper to the stdin/stdout JSON protocol,
converting the traffic to become a JSON payload over a REST service
communicated over a websocket to the browser. This allows language servers
designed for working only over stdin to become distributed.

This mechanism would ship as a default with all Che (and Codenvy)
installations, and likely picked up by the classic Eclipse IDE a bit later.

It would take us about a day or so to package it up. We also have a
tutorial on how to register new language servers, which is fairly easy to
follow as well.  However, we are happy to the packaging work.
https://www.eclipse.org/che/docs/workspace/agents/index.html#creating-new-agents.
Eventually, we look forward to building a public, open source registry of
language servers that would allow any IDE to discover, download, install,
and integrate a language server without first having it packaged for the
platform, but that is a ways off.

If you are not familiar with Che - it was announced in early 2016 as an
Eclipse Project. While people think of it as a browser IDE, it's key focus
is on the workspace, which containes Dockerized runtimes (all your dev
tools), debugger, project code (cloned like you do with localhost), and
then a self-hosted browser IDE. Devs run Che servers which host workspaces
are shared, collaborative. Developers can then use the embedded browser IDE
or their desktop IDE. Che servers are launched as Docker containers "docker
run eclipse/che start", so it lets you have a hosted dev environment
anywhere.  The project has grown in adoption with our 5.0 release in
January containing 1300 commits from 70 contributors including companies
like SAP, Samsung and Red Hat. Telemetry from installs shows us about
150,000 hours of usage / week, up from about 10,000 a year ago.  While our
community is not as seasoned or as big as clang's, we are working hard and
seem to be on the front tip of a cloud development wave.

We are very excited to see this announcement - please reach out to us at
any time, we we'll help do our part.

Tyler

Tyler Jewell | CEO | tyler@​codenvy.​com | 9​78​.8​84​.53​55
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