Having now implemented an LSP server and two different clients for Antlr, I can say I am more familiar with the LSP protocol. From these implementations, what can I say? LSP works well for single client/single server instances, but I am wondering how I can use LSP in a situation that modifies a workspace, reads and alters non-Antlr source code from the Antlr LSP server.
What I want is to add a “go to visitor method” of a grammar symbol feature to my extension. What I mean by this is that I want to find a C#/C++ method that corresponds to the non-terminal symbol (see this documentation for an explanation of a visitor/listener in the Antlr runtime). To do this, the Antlr LSP server needs to parse the grammar to get the name of the grammar symbol the cursor is currently on. But, it needs to parse C# (or C++, etc) as well. Currently, what happens is it assumes the source has been written to disk and the Antlr server uses the Microsoft.CodeAnalysis APIs directly. The user opens a Solution or Project in VS2019, opens a window on an Antlr grammar source file, positions the cursor on a non-terminal, then asks for “go to visitor method”. The Antlr server is called with a custom message “go to visitor method” because the knowledge of Antlr grammars is in the server. The server parses every C# (but could be in C++ or another target language) to find the visitor method corresponding to the grammar non-terminal. If it exists, the server reports the location back to the client. If it doesn’t exist, the server now may create a source file, or modify a source file. It may need to add a class, or a method to correspond to the grammar non-terminal. Note that the Antlr server has no knowledge of whether the client currently has an LSP server opened on the C# source. Nor does it know if the copy is currently being modified but not saved out. It doesn’t modify the workspace and report it back to the client, but it should.
The problem with this scenario is that there is no shared LSP server for the C# code–it’s owned by the editor and/or the LSP server that parses the C# source code. However, I need to parse the source code in order to provide this navigational (and possible source code generation) feature. Is there any coordination of the services between servers?