Apple Opens Up Swift/C LSP Based On Clangd

Built atop LLVM's clangd server, Apple recently open-sourced SourceKit-LSP as a language server protocol for Swift and C-based languages. This allows for better integration with various IDEs and development tools.

Language Server Protocols are a standardized protocol for communicating between integrated development environments / IDEs and servers providing various programming language specific features. These LSPs can be re-used by different development tools / editors while providing the necessary functionality for code completion, code formatting, syntax highlighting, and other features that are language-specific and better off re-used across projects rather than needing to be re-implemented each time.

With Apple's SourceKit-LSP, they are focusing on C/C++ and Swift support while making use of existing LLVM/Clang code as well as Sourcekitd. SourceKit-LSP can work so far on Linux and macOS platforms.

At this point SourceKit-LSP supports code completion, quick help information via hovering, diagnostics, jump-to definitions, find references, and folding. Other features are a work-in-progress. More details on this latest open-source Apple project via GitHub.