Pike Language Server

Rich, IDE-grade language support for Pike in Visual Studio Code — diagnostics, completion, navigation, refactoring, and formatting, powered by the Pike compiler itself.

Install · Features · Configuration · Troubleshooting · Contributing

Why

Pike is a powerful language with a sparse tooling story. This extension brings a modern editing experience to .pike, .pmod, and .mmod files by using pike itself as the semantic oracle — diagnostics, types, and symbol resolution come from the real compiler, not heuristics — with tree-sitter-pike providing fast, incremental syntax parsing.

The extension bundles and manages the language server automatically. Install it, open a Pike file, and it just works.

Installation

Prerequisites

• Pike 8.0+ — install from pike.lysator.liu.se and make sure pike is on your PATH (or set pike.languageServer.path).
• VS Code 1.85+

Install

Get Pike Language Server from the Marketplace, or from the command line:

code --install-extension thesmuks.pike-language-server

Open any .pike, .pmod, or .mmod file and the server starts automatically. The status bar item (bottom-right) shows its state — click it to open the output channel.

Features

A comprehensive LSP feature set, all backed by real compiler information:

Diagnostics

• Live compilation errors and warnings straight from pike, debounced while you type
• Three modes: realtime, saveOnly, or off, with version-gated supersession and cross-file propagation

Navigation

• Go-to-definition and find-references, workspace-wide and across inherit/import chains
• Go-to-implementation for inherited symbols
• Document & workspace symbols, document highlights, folding ranges
• Call hierarchy and type hierarchy

Completion

• Scope-aware local completions with priority ranking
• Member completion through multi-level inheritance, for both -> and . access with type inference
• Chained-call resolution (getContainer()->getItem()->…)
• 5,500+ stdlib symbols (Stdio, Gtk2, Sql, Protocols, …) and 283 predef builtins, with auto-import suggestions
• Snippet completions with parameter placeholders and commit characters

Refactoring & editing

• Scope-aware, cross-file, type-aware rename
• Code actions — remove unused variable, add missing import, generate getters/setters, generate AutoDoc
• Signature help with active-parameter tracking
• Formatting — full-document and on-type, with optional operator spacing
• Code lenses (reference counts), document links (#include paths), inlay hints (inferred types)

Information

• Hover — types, AutoDoc, stdlib signatures, cross-file resolution
• Semantic tokens for precise highlighting
• Smart, scope-aware selection ranges

Configuration

Configure under Settings → Extensions → Pike Language Server, or in settings.json. The most common settings:

There are 25+ settings in total — including worker lifecycle, background indexing, and hibernation tuning — all discoverable in the Settings UI.

Troubleshooting

Server won't start

1. Click the status bar item to open Output → Pike Language Server.
2. Confirm pike --version works in your terminal and reports 8.0 or newer.
3. Check that pike.languageServer.path points to a working Pike binary.

Diagnostics not appearing — ensure pike.languageServer.diagnosticMode is realtime or saveOnly.

Status bar shows a warning icon — click it to inspect the error. Common causes: Pike not found, version too old, or file permissions.

For deeper diagnosis, set pike.languageServer.trace.server to verbose and check the output channel.

Architecture

A Tier-3 LSP: pike is the semantic oracle and tree-sitter-pike is the syntactic parser. The server is TypeScript (vscode-languageserver-node) split into 60+ focused modules, following a strict style budget (500-line files, 50-line functions, explicit error handling, bounded caches).

Correctness is anchored to the compiler: the test suite derives every expected result from pike itself — no hand-written expectations — across ~490 Pike (PUnit) tests, a 90-file language corpus, and TypeScript LSP integration tests.

See docs/architecture.md for the full design and docs/decisions/ for the decision records.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Quick start:

bun install          # install dependencies
bun run build        # build server + client
bun run test:all     # TypeScript + Pike test suites
bun run typecheck    # type-check
bun run fmt:check    # formatting check

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines and docs/ci.md for the CI pipeline.

Links

• Visual Studio Marketplace
• Changelog · License (MIT)
• Pike language · tree-sitter-pike