Metal Code completion

[yaroslavyaroslav]

Hey, I think this is the best possible repo to ask for.

So you develop pretty extensive codebase in metal, but AFAIK there's no code completion available for metal by whatever SourceKit nor clangd nor within Xcode.

The best I could get is to mimic metal to c++ and thus get at least somehow partially working code completion and type hinting for metal.

How you guys (any of you) actually handle this? It's hard to believe that this codebase was developed in kinda plain notepad style.

[wisefool769]

@yaroslavyaroslav I was just thinking this too. I made a hobbyist native iOS app a bit ago, and the lack of good AI assistance was pretty painful. I ended up using Cursor's Agent mode and the Gemini CLI to write most of the code and then inspect it in XCode for final adjustments and submission. I had to write some scaffolding linting configuration and tester scripts to mimic XCode and XCode Cloud's behavior to speed up testing for the bots.

One would think XCode should have optional code completion with a FOSS LLM that runs locally via MLX.
XCode downloaded some predictive code completion module when it started up but I didn't see a way to configure and use it.

[yaroslavyaroslav]

No I meant literal code completion. Like with LSP. Metal itself as a language has lack of any of it in both Xcode and LSP.

So the only thing I have for now is to call the following to validate the code correctness: xcrun metal -fsyntax-only some_shader.metal.

But jump to definition with clangd if to mimic metal to c++ code is still way too limited.

Ps: Ai assistance works great tho, Codex with o3 is pretty solid for this at my taste.