classicvalues / erlide_kernel

Erlang IDE engine supporting source code indexing and manipulation. Currently only an Eclipse client is implemented.

Generic Erlang engine for source code indexing and manipulation, that can be used by code editors and IDES to provide advanced functionality. This functionality will be accessible via VSCode's Language Server Protocol and Debug Protocol, possibly with some extensions. The server application is the endpoint.

Important note

The content of this repository is highly volatile at the moment. I am working on stabilizing it (structure, release engineering, APIs) and I will remove this notice when it is safe to use by third parties.

Initially, the content is the same as it was in the erlide repository.

Description (vision)

The erlide kernel will implement the core functionality of an IDE:

• keep track of projects and their respective files, watch or get notified of any changes
• parse the code while keeping track of the exact source text and the dependencies between files and projects
• build a database of the projects' entities
• expose APIs to query and update this database, for services such as
  • syntactic and semantic code annotations (to be used by highlighting editors, for example)
  • code completion
  • cross references (declarations, references, call graphs)
  • extracting documentation
  • refactoring
• read/edit the projects' build configuration and launch build tools
• launch the projects' code and interact with it (debug, trace, profile)
• launch, examine and interact with Erlang nodes

Notes

• The OTP version specified in the rebar.config files for each subproject MUST be used for compilation. The build script installs those using kerl in ~/erlide_tools (in the future the location should be configurable).
• As transport for the communication protocols we will implement TCP and stdio, but others are possible.