Unified Rust-based tooling (LSP, linter, formatter) for PowerShell #27604
Replies: 3 comments 3 replies
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This is certainly something that would be an interesting to see happen. I think this is something that you should add to one of the PowerShell Community calls as a discussion point as this isn't a small change & lots of work & whilst aspirational I worry that this would displace current engineers that have built those tools so far in the languages that they are currently in. FWIW, I've previously floated the idea of rewriting some of PowerShell's internals in F# as opposed to C# but that definitely wasn't something that was likely to ever happen, even with all our new #AssistiveTechBuddies / AI Agents that can help in these bigger often unrealistic engineering projects. I get the FYI I also added this for discussion in the PowerShell Discord Server |
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Also worth considering that Engineering effort to do this (with/without use of AI tooling) would be a multi-year multi-million $$$ project that would require a larger team under Steve to achieve it & would need a dedicated Project Manager too. As such I can't really see it happening unless someone wanted to pitch this as high up as Mark Russinovich though that's something that I think should be done internally if Steve thought this was worth pursuing |
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Why does it have to be Rust? C# can get 99% of the way there just fine performance wise, Rust isn't some magical "everything is fast" language. And as much of a fan as I am of F#, C# is generally better performance wise because F# has its own required constructs that add allocations and overhead, so the argument for F# would be more around determinism (which you can do in C# as well) Theoretically, but it hasn't replaced TextMate in vscode yet. When it becomes an option we'll definitely explore it in PSES. Not to be a naysayer, but as someone who actually has done this work now day in day out for years, there are definitely opportunities to improve, but just saying "rewrite everything in rust" is doomed to failure IMHO. There's also nothing stopping you from doing it yourself! Script Analysis, syntax highlighting, etc. can be relatively extrinsic to PowerShell, you can make a custom LSP in Rust that does all that stuff. |
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I'm not convinced that Rust is so much better than C# that it's worth a rewrite, but even if it somehow was, it still has an accessibility problem. I think many of the people who'd be interested in contributing to PowerShell and PowerShell tooling come from the PowerShell world. |
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A lot of people also tend to forget that C# has advanced heavily in AOT compliation, there's plenty of ways to make high performance single file executables in C# to do the same kind of work, and still be able to reuse a lot of the existing stuff. Unfortunately PowerShell heavily relies on reflection and other things that get in the way of some AOT optimizations, but some static tooling could easily work this direction. |
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The only crossover I can see is those that are interested in DSC due to it now being a rust based project & are actively contributing to that and other rust projects and are less engaged with PowerShell/C# based projects |
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About
This is just a suggestion, a topic for discussion.
Please correct me if I've written anything wrong.
Suggestion
Improve the PowerShell authoring experience by creating a new unified PowerShell tool in Rust to act as LSP, linter, formatter, and as base for IDE extensions.
Context
PowerShell tooling for LSP, lint and formatting is dated, incomplete and moving slow.
Rust based tooling (LSP, lint, format, type check), often also used as base for IDE extensions, are popping up for other languages. Examples:
nu --lsp). There is also an established Tree-sitter grammar (tree-sitter-nu) used for editor tooling.The skeleton / architecture exists in these tools for PowerShell to take inspiration from. There is also this unofficial tree-sitter grammar that I believe can be piggy backed for CST (concrete syntax tree) and formatting:
Other arguments:
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