Those of you who follow the Emacs scene will remember that last year there was a big kerfuffle about whether or not GCC should export its AST so that Emacs, for instance, could use it to provide better syntactic and semantic information about C programs. It seemed like a no-brainer but RMS objected on the grounds that unscrupulous actors could use the information to build proprietary tools.
Now we have this:
RMS supports Language Server Protocol integration into Emacs core https://t.co/UDaGVbBj53 #Emacs
— Emacs BOT (@emacsbot) May 4, 2017
Perry Metzger recently made me aware of the Language Server Protocol (LSP) and the advantages it offers to editors. Instead of building in custom language parsers, editors can use LSP to get information about the structure and meaning of programs and thereby offer better information to the programmer.
The good news pointed to by the above tweet is that RMS has endorsed this effort, greatly increasing the probability that it will be implemented in Emacs. Who knows? Perhaps this will provide an answer to all those people saying, “I’d like to use Emacs but I’m working in Java so…”