Re: [Vala] C# Developer

[Christian Hergert <christian hergert me>]

On 10/09/2018 11:38 AM, Ulink wrote:
> Maybe improving Gnome builder Vala integration is the right way?

Builder needs someone familiar with Vala internals to take over the Vala
plugin (src/plugins/vala-pack) if you want to get better quality
integration. I simply don't have time to work on it given my queue.

One thing many of us learned while working on MonoDevelop internals was
that to build really good auto-completion and diagnostics, you need to
change how you write the compiler. That is in fairly stark contrast to
writing an efficient compiler for other uses. (Roslyn was a major effort
on that front). You need to keep a lot more data around than you'd need
want otherwise. Especially since you'll be mostly working with partial
files that don't parse fully and need access to the previous AST while
performing completions on the partial.

Writing a compiler is hard work, and doing one that doesn't leak/crash
is even harder. So we really want to see the Vala plugin follow our work
with Clang last cycle and move things out of process (while maintaining
good performance despite IPC). That allows us to supervise/kill the
language server as necessary.

I wrote jsonrpc-glib to make it easier to write language servers.
Corentin started on extracting the Vala plugin from Builder, but it
needs someone to push through on it.

https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-builder/tree/wip/tintou/vala-subprocess

But even with that, it sounds like some features are missing from the
Vala compiler to get quality completion results.

-- Christian