Swift-MesonLSP

A reimplementation of my Meson language server in Swift.

Current feature set

• Hovering (Documentation often copied verbatim/minimally modified from mesonbuild, CC BY-SA 4.0, same for the entire Sources/MesonDocs directory due to ShareAlike)
• Symbol resolving
• Jump-To-Definition
• Jump-To-Subdir
• A basic set of diagnostics
• Formatting
• Document symbols
• Rudimentary autocompletion
• Inlay hints
• Highlighting

Limitations

• Not as efficient as it could be: On each textDocument/didChange notification, the entire tree is newly typechecked. ASTs without type annotations are cached.
• set_variable/get_variable with non-constant variable name will fail in more complex cases. See here for working patterns
• No wrap/subproject support
• subdir with non-constant subdir name will fail in more complex cases. See here for working patterns
• Type deduction is not 100% correct yet
• Autocompletion is very flaky
• Type definitions may have minor errors regarding:
  • Is this argument optional?
  • What is the type of the argument?

Why a reimplementation?

The first version, written in Vala, had some code maintenance problems because basically everything was done in one file. I had the choice between untangling that mess or rewriting it as cleanly as possible. I have chosen the latter because I wanted to learn Swift.

Contact

I made a matrix channel: #mesonlsp:matrix.org Feel free to join in case you want to ask questions, get support or contribute.

Installation

Dependencies

Fedora

• Language Server: sudo dnf install swift-lang libstdc++-static
• GNOME-Builder plugin: sudo dnf install git vala meson gcc libgee-devel json-glib-devel gtk4-devel gtksourceview5-devel libadwaita-devel libpeas-devel template-glib-devel g++ libsoup3-devel

Ubuntu

TBD: For the moment, just follow what the docker files do:

• Language Server
• GNOME-Builder plugin

Install the language server

You can either download the file from the releases or build it yourself.

git clone https://github.com/JCWasmx86/Swift-MesonLSP
cd Swift-MesonLSP
swift build -c release --static-swift-stdlib
sudo cp .build/release/Swift-MesonLSP /usr/local/bin

Or you can use podman (Maybe even docker, but only podman is tested):

DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 podman build --file Dockerfile --output out --no-cache .
# If you want to use Ubuntu as docker image
DOCKER_BUILDKIT=1 podman build --file Dockerfile.ubuntu --output out --no-cache .

This will place a file "Fedora37.zip" (Or Ubuntu22.04.zip) in the directory out. It contains two statically linked binaries. Copy Swift-MesonLSP to /usr/local/bin.

A debug build is provided, too. Just rename it from Swift-MesonLSP.debug to Swift-MesonLSP and copy it to the right destination.

Connect with your editor

GNOME Builder Nightly

git clone https://github.com/JCWasmx86/GNOME-Builder-Plugins
cd GNOME-Builder-Plugins
# The other plugins in the repo
# get disabled
meson -Dplugin_clangd=disabled \
      -Dplugin_gitgui=disabled \
      -Dplugin_icon_installer=disabled \
      -Dplugin_scriptdir=disabled \
      -Dplugin_shfmt=disabled \
      -Dplugin_swift_templates=disabled \
      -Dplugin_texlab=disabled \
      _build
cd _build
# Don't do "sudo ninja install"
ninja -j $(nproc) install

Kate

Add this JSON to ~/.config/kate/lspclient/settings.json:

{
  "servers": {
    "meson": {
      "command": [
        "Swift-MesonLSP",
        "--lsp"
      ],
      "rootIndicationFileNames": [
        "meson.build",
        "meson_options.txt"
      ],
      "url": "https://github.com/JCWasmx86/Swift-MesonLSP",
      "highlightingModeRegex": "^Meson$"
    }
  }
}

After that, a dialog should be shown asking you to confirm that the language server may be started.

neovim

Add this JSON to :CocConfig:

{
    "languageserver": {
        "meson": {
            "command": "Swift-MesonLSP",
            "args": ["--lsp"],
            "rootPatterns": ["meson.build"],
            "filetypes": ["meson"]
        }
    }
}

VSCode

Install this fork of vscode-meson: https://github.com/JCWasmx86/vscode-meson

Notes

On Fedora, you can use the install.sh script. It will automatically install all dependencies. (It will ask you for your root password using sudo, but don't execute the script using sudo)

Want to contribute?

Take an item from the TODO list in PROGRESS.md and work on it. Feel free to join the matrix channel #mesonlsp:matrix.org

Debugging performance problems

The language server is measuring the duration needed by certain operations and exposes it using a HTTP-Server on http://localhost:65000 (Or any higher port, if 65000 is already used)

This picture shows an example of the rendered timing information. The project used is mesa and it got fully parsed 35 times.

• analyzingTypes is the section in which all nodes of the AST are annotated with their possible type(s)
• sendingDiagnostics is the section, where all diagnostics are sent back to the editor/client
• rebuildTree is responsible for clearing all diagnostics, parsing all meson files, annotating the types, sending the newdiagnostics
• parsingEntireTree is the section for parsing the entire project, patching the ASTs, etc.
• SelectionStatementTypeMerge is part of the type analyzer. It is responsible for merging the possible types after different branches.
• patchingAST is the section in which all subdir('foo') calls are replaced by nodes referencing the corresponding source files.
• buildingAST is the section in which the tree sitter nodes are converted to easier to use objects
• parsing is the section for just parsing a file using tree-sitter
• checkCall is for checking the arguments of the call (Except type checking at the moment)
• clearingDiagnostics is the section in that all diagnostics are cleared before rebuilding the tree.
• checkIdentifier checks, if an identifier follows snake_case
• guessingMethod is a method that attempts to deduce the possible methods that are called on an any object.
• evalStack is responsible for getting types of variables that were overwritten in previous branches of selection statements.

In this example, it took around half-second to parse the entire mesa meson files, deduce the types and emit diagnostics.

Code coverage

• Build with swift build -c release --static-swift-stdlib -Xswiftc -profile-generate -Xswiftc -profile-coverage-mapping
• Run the program
• cp default.profraw /somedir
• llvm-profdata merge -sparse default.profraw -o default.profdata
• llvm-cov export --instr-profile default.profdata ~/Projects/Swift-MesonLSP/.build/release/Swift-MesonLSP -format lcov|swift demangle > out.lcov
• genhtml --ignore-errors source out.lcov --legend --output-directory=/tmp/somepath

References

• gnome-builder#629 An issue somewhat related to this project.

Dependencies

• ConsoleKit - APIs for creating interactive CLI tools. (Used the loghandler from there to have nice logs)
• Perfect-INIParser - A lightweight INI file parser in Server Side Swift
• sourcekit-lsp - Language Server Protocol implementation for Swift and C-based languages. (I used the JSONRPC definitions from them)
• swift-argument-parser - Straightforward, type-safe argument parsing for Swift
• swift-atomics - Lowlevel atomic operations for Swift
• Swifter - Tiny http server engine written in Swift programming language.
• swift-crypto - Open-source implementation of a substantial portion of the API of Apple CryptoKit suitable for use on Linux platforms.
• swift-log - A Logging API for Swift
• SwiftTreeSitter - Swift API for the tree-sitter incremental parsing system
• tree-sitter-meson - A tree-sitter grammar for meson.build files. Forked and enhanced by me.

Projects I tested the language server with

• Working fine:
  • Fractal
  • GitG
  • GLib
  • GNOME Builder
  • GNOME Builder Plugins
  • GTK
  • libswiftdemangle
  • Mesa
  • QEMU
  • rustc-demangle
  • Systemd
• Somewhat flaky:
  • GStreamer