Roadmap / help needed?

[strangemonad]

@RLovelett I'm curious the direction you'd like to take this project. There are several vscode swift extensions and all of them are in an incomplete state. I'd love to reduce the fragmentation and put efforts behind 1 project

[RLovelett]

Funny you should ask. So here is probably the most recent state of the extension.

The bottom line is that right now I want to see this plugin work on Linux. That is my priority. As I said in that comment I feel like macOS has Xcode. Linux has nothing.

I think I could be swayed on some other priorities but at this point that feels like the most pressing.

Do you have any suggestions of priorities?

[strangemonad]

Cool, just digested that other thread. I pretty much agree on all the points.

1. Linux support is needed (even if it's imperfect at first) like you mentioned it's been a bit of a chicken and an egg problem and lack of proper tooling just stymies progress for people moderately interested. I think that's at least part of why the rust ecosystem is much more vibrant ATM.

2. Though linux support has lulled, I'm hopeful it will get another good push with the work Latner and co. are doing with swift tensorflow at Google.

3. Also agree on the design decision of the language server as a useful artifact on its own. Very robust Rust IntelliJ support was possible because they share a common language server inspired core. https://github.com/rust-lang-nursery/rls

FWIW, even though I'm on macOS, I'm not trying to use swift like your typical macOS / iOS dev. I don't care about Xcode and I'm not building on UIKit. I'm mostly building systems stuff and work much like a linux systems dev.

As for other priorities (once linux works):

1. (low hanging) how can we make vscode-swift self-contained? Installing the language server manually is a pain. I have no idea how vscode works in this respect.

2. even once it was installed, intelli-sense and goto-definition were fairly non-optimal (to the point of not being much more useful than just syntax highlighting).

3. The ability to jump to definitions from dependencies and swift core itself.

4. quick view of docs (not sure what vscode calls this)

5. quick view of function and constructor signatures as you're filling them out (also not sure what vscode calls this)