Status of this repo?

[taylorplewe]

Hi, just wondering what the status of ca65-lsp is? I had the idea to create a language server for ca65 written in Rust and lo and behold it's already been done! Is it ready enough to for instance be implemented by a VSCode extension?

[techwritescode]

Hello! Thanks for the interest! I put this project on hold for a bit to focus on an intellij addon of the same nature. If there is interest I might be able to allocate some time to work on it. My time has been a bit limited as of late so additional contributors would be more than welcome.

[taylorplewe]

My time is also pretty limited because of life lol. I'll poke around and see what you've got, and if I can get it running in VSCode. What I really want is features similar to what the rust-analyzer and Zig Language extensions provide for those languages, like type annotations (inlay hints), hover hints, go-to-definition, view references, all that stuff, but for ca65 65816 assembly:

Zig Language extension

65816 assembly. It's difficult to tell how much space I allocated for mode1_hscroll just by looking at it, unless I rename the variable itself some hungarian notation thing like dwMode1Hscroll. Would be really cool to have an inlay hint there to just tell at a glance, so I don't have to give my variables ugly names.

[techwritescode]

I was going for a similar feature set. Inlay hints could be used to annotate memory addresses, with the computer type set by a dot config. I’ll have a look into it over the next week.

[techwritescode]

Somewhat related, but I’m assuming you’re using 65816 assembly for the SNES, correct? I’ll attempt to add that memory map as well.

[taylorplewe]

Correct, SNES

[taylorplewe]

On the same note, how should the extra instructions be handled? I suppose it's not the job of the language server to know (or care) whether you're programming for the 6502 line or the 65816; just that it's ca65 syntax 🤷‍♂

[techwritescode]

Correct. If there needed to be extra linting rules for specific processor models that would be typically handled by a configuration file. If specific linting is not required it would complete all instructions. Perhaps for this LSP specifically we do not show inlay hints for specific processor models and complete everything if no config exists, adding specific linting when a machine is specified?

[taylorplewe]

You're saying if I have a repo with no config file, the language server takes the generic route of auto-completing all possible instructions, and not showing any memory address inlay hints for variables? That makes sense to me. Were you just thinking a JSON config file? So something like

{
    "cpu": "65C816"
}

or even

{
    "target": "snes"
}

[techwritescode]

My thoughts exactly. I think this would be the safest way to cover the features without getting too lost in the details of specific machines.

[techwritescode]

If you are interested in collaborating on this, feel free to private message me on LinkedIn.