zls VS zig.vim

There is no official documentation but the standard library provides definitions for the exchange format and an incomplete set of function for exchanging messages in Client.zig and Server.zig. You can find examples of the zig compile server in action in my PR for ZLS and a showcase of hot-code-swapping by kubkon. The code that implements the ZCS in the zig codebase can be found here.

For the people who come in the future and want to know how to do it, here is the code as of today (at some point it will be in ZLS repository - github.com/zigtools/zls - and you should take a look there too to see more up-to-date code).

> Building is slow. It takes about ~3 seconds minimum which is frustratingly slow when I'm fighting basic syntax errors. I wish there was a fast zig check.

> Lack of zig-analyzer makes learning hard.

> zig fmt src/main.zig is nice. Wish it automatically ran on all files.

I also did (well, "am doing", can only work a bit each day and am plugging through day 7 right now) AdventOfCode in Zig this year.

These points here didn't resonate with me at all. I wonder if the author knew about or tried ZLS[0]. I had it on and integrated with my VSCode and it would check a lot of things as I went and format on save. I think I followed something like this[1] to set it up.

[0] https://github.com/zigtools/zls

cd $HOME/.local/zls && curl -L https://github.com/zigtools/zls/releases/download/0.9.0/x86_64-macos.tar.xz | tar -xJ --strip-components=1 -C .

There is zig-vim, language server and support in nvim-treesitter

ZLS provides Visual Studio Code (or any other editor with LSP support) with features such as completions, goto definition, find references, rename symbol and format code. If you have git installed recursively clone the repository else you can download and extract an archive of the source from here: https://github.com/zigtools/zls/archive/master.zip. Also download and extract https://github.com/ziglibs/known-folders/archive/master.zip and https://github.com/ziglibs/zinput/archive/master.zip and extract them to the zls/src directory. Use your terminal (cmd.exe) to change into the zls directory and run zig build. If that was successful a zls.exe should exist in zig-cache/bin.

As a challenge, I wanted to get Zig working with my config. I timed myself from the first tab opening, to the point I was able to edit Zig files with syntax working and the LSP setup. This took me 30 minutes. Most of that time was spent trying to compile zls because of a current incompatibility with the latest Zig master release. The time I spent learning how to configure properly my editor is time that I will never spend trying to figure out how another program works, trying to memorize hundreds of different nonsensical, arbitrary keybinds, trying to figure out how the workflow of an editor Unfortunately, I don't think Neovim (especially the nightly features) is mature enough for a "distribution" like SpaceVim to really work. We're getting there, but I'd say it's worth waiting for the official 0.5 release.

I'm not a fan of debuggers and whatnot, so I don't have anything for that, but I use zig.vim for Zig/C/C++/Obj. C/anything else integration like highlighting. Additionally, vim-scripts/a.vim can be used for alternating between implementation/header files. I don't use it myself but vim-snippets can be used for common snippets.

Out of the box Vim works well enough as an editor for Zig but the experience is a bit underwhelming. So I installed the Vim configuration for Zig plugin get syntax highlighting.

About the fast zig check, looking around the the zig.vim plugin code, I think it would be zig fmt --ast-check.

There is zig-vim, language server and support in nvim-treesitter

install zig for vim : https://github.com/ziglang/zig.vim