At the DevNation 2016 conference in San Francisco, Microsoft, Red Hat and Codenvy have announced that they are working together on a new language server protocol. The effort, which is linked to the open source Eclipse Che project, would provide a common way to integrate programming languages into code editors and integrated development environments (IDEs).
“Historically, most programming languages have only been optimized for a single tool,” explained Tyler Jewell, Codenvy CEO and Eclipse Che project lead. “This has prevented developers from using the editors they know and love, and has limited opportunities for language providers to reach a wide audience. With a common protocol supported by Microsoft, Red Hat and Codenvy, developers can gain access to intelligence for any language within their favorite tools.”
Interestingly, the effort will see the open source community adopting some Microsoft technologies. “The Eclipse Che team and Red Hat have also announced they’re adopting Visual Studio Code’s Language Server Protocol—an open protocol that enables some of the rich editing features in VS Code,” blogged Joseph Sirosh, corporate vice president of the Data Group at Microsoft. “This shows that the open-source contributions from VS Code are being adopted by tool and language providers, giving developers the flexibility to pair their favorite language with their favorite tools.”
