Why is rescript-vscode written in typescript but not rescript?
How could one decide on using rescript or ts?
Why is rescript-vscode written in typescript but not rescript?
How could one decide on using rescript or ts?
It’s a quick solution/prototype to enable minimal editor support for rescript and gather feedbacks. maybe the code is initiated from a template or another extension, not sure though. I think it will be written in rescript in long term.
I took the VS Code server and rewrote it in ReScript for coc-rescript this morning to learn how language servers work
It’s indeed initiated from a template, and indeed for quicker and better initial iteration =).
The truth is that the bulk of complexity in such project comes from the language-server protocol itself. MS provides the right helpers in TypeScript (naturally). VSCode also has dedicated debugging facilities that help with writing a language server; the vertical integration works. It’s already a lot of mental gymnastic to unwrangle the lang-server spec (plus making sure it’s solid and performant, which it is not by default, due to its nature of being a distributed system architecture), so I didn’t find a point in first yak shaving with ReScript bindings and “reimagining” a different kind of architecture by wrapping the existing one.
Once the plugin’s solid, then we can decide to convert it to ReScript cost-free thanks to our interop and conversion method.
I do believe this question was asked with the nice intent, but let me take this occasion to address a bigger issue!
It doesn’t always make sense to prioritize bootstrapping. Case in point, our compiler isn’t written in ReScript either. It’s a bit self-serving and imo a perspective issue in some more purist/naive corners of our community. Writing something in ReScript doesn’t suddenly guarantee that your code is gonna be all shiny and error-free. Consider that the whole purpose of this effort is to provide a more robust successor to RLS, which is written in old ReScript.
Our desired differentiator for our community vs others is that we start with the perspective “how can I make this product great?” (like some Indie community for macOS and games) and then hopefully see that ReScript can be a good tool in achieving that purpose in many cases. We should never start with “ok, where can I shoehorn ReScript next? Here’s a potential use-case!”. High quality software rarely comes from the latter mentality imo (and any other kind of premature abstraction). Actually, brute forcing ReScript into a situation without proper consideration is how you lose credibility among your teammates when you try to convince them to use ReScript, as I’ve seen happen many times.
Quality product first!