No, that would probably be shuai.fu@monash.edu. I just saw it on HN.
Yes. Unfortunately I’m not very familiar with GHC and HLS internals.
What I do know is that when GHC is invoked with a certain flag, as it compiles each Haskell file, it generates a .hie
file with intermediate data which can be used by IDEs. So HLS (and maybe JetBrains Haskell) works by invoking GHC to parse and type-check the active haskell file, and then queries the .hie
file to get diagnostics, symbol lookups, and completions. There’s also a program called hiedb
which can query .hie
files on the command line.
Rust’s language server is completely different (salsa.rs). The common detail is that both of them have LLVM IR, but also higher-level IRs, and the compiler passes information in the higher-level IRs to IDEs for completions/lookups/diagnostics/etc. (in Haskell via the generated .hie
files)
The main drawback is being a new incomplete language. No solid IDE support, huge online resources, training data for LLMs; and you have a not-tiny chance of the compiler crashing or producing the wrong output.
IDE-friendliness and most of the other features, I don’t think there are any major flaws. The main drawback with these is implementation complexity, possibly slower compile time (and maybe runtime if this IR prevents optimizations). There are also unknown drawbacks of doing new and experimental things. Maybe they have the right idea but will take the wrong approach, e.g. create an IR which is IDE-friendly but has issues in the design, which a different IDE-friendly IR would not.
Some of these features and ideas have been at least partly tried before. The JVM bytecode is very readable. LLVM IR is not, but most languages (e.g. Rust, Haskell) have some higher intermediate-representation which is and the IDE does static analysis off of that. And some of the other features (ADTs, functor-libs, blocks) are already common in other languages, especially newer ones.
But there are some features like typed-strings and invariants, which to me seem immediately useful but I don’t really see them in other languages. Ultimately I don’t think I can really speak to the language’s usefulness or flaws before they are further in development, but I am optimistic if they keep making progress.
It's funny because, I'm probably the minority, but I strongly prefer JetBrains IDEs.
Which ironically are much more "walled gardens": closed-source and subscription-based, with only a limited subset of parts and plugins open-source. But JetBrains has a good track record of not enshittifying and, because you actually pay for their product, they can make a profitable business off not doing so.
IMO the 1 and only important reason is that PHP today is much different than PHP of the past. PHP's notoriety comes from its early days, but now I hear it's another general-purpose language with modern design, good IDE support, and tons of online resources. Plus it's a explicitly designed for server-side scripting, so if that's your goal it will be the best (most straightforward and supported) choice.
https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/wt6wam/newbie_here_is_using_php_still_fine/
https://phptherightway.com/