chapel-vscode extension

Core Features

• Intellisense
  • Go to Definition: jump to or peek a symbol's definition
  • Hover: hover over a symbol to view its signature and documentation
  • References: view all mentions of a symbol across a workspace
  • Code Completion: suggest completion for symbols in the current file
  • Symbol List: see all symbols in a file
  • Errors/Warning: see Chapel errors and warnings
• Linting
  • see Chapel linter warnings on potential errors and style suggestions
• Snippets
• Syntax Highlighting

Experimental Features

• Intellisense
  • Inlays: view values, types, and named call arguments inline with code
  • Generic Instantiations: inspect generic code with helpful annotations
  • Dead Code: highlight dead code that will never execute

CAUTION: These features use a work-in-progress resolver for Chapel called Dyno to further inspect your code. To enable these features, use Dyno by setting chapel.chpl-language-server.resolver to true. Enabling the Dyno resolver for most Chapel projects will likely result in a crash.

Setup

After installing the extension, follow these steps to make sure VSCode is set up to use the extension.

From an existing Chapel build

The extension can auto-detect your CHPL_HOME, just open a Chapel file. The extension will prompt you to select an existing Chapel install to configure your editor. If you don't see your value of CHPL_HOME or don't know the right one, run chpl --print-chpl-home to get the right value. If the automatic installation fails, you can explicitly set your CHPL_HOME in your VSCode settings.json as "chapel.CHPL_HOME": "/path/to/your/chapel/home".

The extension can also auto-build the Chapel language tools and will prompt you to do so if they are missing. If you prefer to build them manually, run the following: (export CHPL_HOME=/path/to/your/chapel/home && cd $CHPL_HOME && make chpl-language-server && make chplcheck)

Without an existing Chapel build

1. Obtain a copy of latest Chapel source release from https://chapel-lang.org/download.html
2. After downloading the tar, extract the source tree with tar xzf chapel-VERSION.tar.gz
3. After unpacking the tar, you can treat this as your CHPL_HOME ("/path/to/unpacked/source/chapel-VERSION") and follow the steps for an existing Chapel build.

Linter options

Individual linter rules in the Chapel linter, chplcheck, can be turned on or off. This is done by adding arguments to your VSCode settings. For example, the following turns on the NestedCoforalls and UnusedFormal rules.

"chapel.chplcheck.args": [
  "--enable-rule", "NestedCoforalls", "--enable-rule", "UnusedFormal"
],