driftscript-language

The DriftScript language server: it calls the compiler and re-implements no part of it.

npm i -D driftscript-language

It installs driftscript with it, pinned to the exact version, and puts a driftscript-language binary on your path.

The one decision everything else rests on

There is no parser, type checker, effect checker or linker in this package. diagnostics() is compileDriftScript().diagnostics, exactly, and a test compiles a corpus both ways and asserts they are deep-equal — same code, same span, same words.

A server with its own front end disagrees with the build eventually: a keyword the lexer learned and the server did not, a rule the checker tightened. The day it does, people learn to distrust the squiggles, and they are right to. A squiggle that is sometimes wrong is worse than none, because it costs attention every time.

The exact version pin is the other half of that. A server compiled against a different compiler than your build runs is precisely the disagreement the agreement test exists to prevent, so a language release is two publishes in a fixed order, not a caret range.

What it does own

Position mapping, the document store, caching, incremental scheduling, and the two features that present compiler facts without computing any: capability-true completion, and semantic tokens carrying effects and determinism.

Completion is capability-true. An unavailable capability is offered and marked, never hidden. Hiding it teaches a script author the surface does not exist; showing it greyed teaches them it exists and their target does not provide it, which is true, actionable, and what the linker would tell them thirty seconds later.

Running it

npx driftscript-language --host ./capabilities.json

Or from an editor client, as a stdio language server.

The host argument is what makes completion and hover useful, and without it they offer nothing while diagnostics still work. The server says which state it is in on startup, so you are never reading a list that is honest about nothing:

DriftScript · 3 modules · manifest: my-game · registry: 54 capabilities

The host crosses as data, not as a module, and that is not a preference. A language server is a plain Node process, and a host whose packages use extensionless relative imports cannot be imported by one at all. A registry describes and never invokes, so nothing in a definition is a function and all of it survives the boundary. serializeRegistry from driftscript writes the file; --host reads it.

A --host that names something other than a .json is imported as a module, and may export registry, manifest, or both. Anything it does not export is absent, never defaulted, and the startup line says which.

Editor clients

The VSCode client is on the marketplace as DriftTech.driftscript-vscode, and its source is in the same repository at editors/vscode. It bundles this package, so installing it needs nothing else.

Any LSP client works. The server speaks stdio and needs no extension-specific handshake.

Version

driftscript-language and driftscript move together, in that order. See the changelog.

Licence

MIT. See LICENSE.