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This is the wiki of Dagor Shader Language Support for Visual Studio Code, a Visual Studio extension to support DSHL.
The goal of this wiki is to make it easier to understand how this project works. When I explain something, I try to give you some context, but I won't describe the underlying technologies in detail. For this, each page has a Useful resources section, where you can find links that give you more in-depth explanations. In these wiki pages, I'd like to focus on the project structure, ideas behind decisions, tips, and tricks.
This is a Visual Studio extension, and its goal is to add full language support for DSHL and HLSL. If you want to know more about the extension's features, read the README.md, and the CHANGELOG.md files. The extension is published under the BSD-3 license, which you can read in the LICENSE file. The extension is published, and it's available both in Visual Studio Marketplace, and in Visual Studio's Extensions / Manage Extensions... page.
The extension uses the Language Server Protocol to provide its features. The Language Server Protocol is basically a specification which standardizes IDE features like code completion, formatting, go to definition, etc. It splits the execution to 2 parts: the client and the server. The client (this repository) is an IDE-specific extension which starts the language server and sends requests towards it as the user interacts with the source code. The language server (don't confuse it with web servers) answers those requests. This means that although the client is IDE-specific, it's very thin and the language server does the heavy lifting, like analyzing the source code. The Language Server Protocol has many advantages:
- the language server runs in a different process, therefore it won't block the IDE if the analyzation takes a lot of time
- the communication is standardized, so the language server doesn't have to know the IDE's API and doesn't have to be written in the same language
- don't have to write the language features for all the IDEs, you have to write the language server only once, and all client can use it
While the syntax highlight, and the declarative language features are part of the client, those files are shared between the different clients, therefore stored in the language server's repository.
- Make settings work with the extension, like in VS Code. Here is a guide how to do it, but I couldn't make it work. For me, even the sample couldn't work (the settings part).
- Add snippets, like in VS Code. I could make it work, with some predefined languages, like JavaScript, or C#, but not with DSHL.
If you find a bug, create an issue, but please give me as much information as possible. If it's not obvious, what's the cause of the problem, please include the extension's version, Visual Studio's version, the operating system, create screenshots or videos, or anything that might be helpful.