slangd fails to start with Neovim LSP due NULL/missing value in JSON about slang

[csyonghe]

I think your workaround makes sense by treating null as empty string. Can you open a PR from your branch?

[jsmall-zzz]

I think this would probably better to just return UnownedStringSlice() rather than UnownedStringSlice("", 0).
There is a somewhat subtle distinction between UnownedStringSlice("") and UnownedStringSlice() - in that both are in effect empty strings, but it provides a way to differentiate a zero length string and an invalid/null string.

[csyonghe]

If you are using the release build, that SLANG_ASSERT shouldn't exist to crash slangd. If it does, then it is something up in the callstack that can't handle an empty UnowendStringSlice, which is more worrying.

[theHamsta]

If you are using the release build, that SLANG_ASSERT shouldn't exist to crash slangd. If it does, then it is something up in the callstack that can't handle an empty UnowendStringSlice, which is more worrying.

I remember that the release build crashed with new throwing an out of memory error. I could only used debug mode to investigate the issue.

[csyonghe]

I see. So the real issue is still something different.