LanguageServer: how to tell language server which are relevant files to resolve symbols from

[hzeller]

Unlike other languages, often in (System)Verilog the source of declarations or definitions are not quite clear as includes are more rarely used; instead, the project is composed by all the files put together by the build system.

So in order to build a proper symbol table, we need to know all the files involved (similar what is passed to the project tool and kythe extractor. In this case however, the tool is running in the background, started by the editor.

Check out how this is 'typically' done. I suspect tools such as clangd read the compilation database, but there is no such standard in the Verilog world. The only somewhat agreed-upon 'standard' is a filelist. Maybe we can require that there is a file-list somewhere in the root directory of the project with a particular name ? A flag that is passed to the language server at start-up time ? (some editors provide ways to customize the invocation of the LSP) We can also add a custom JSON RPC request to convey that into the language server (highly specialized. Maybe there is already something in the LSP spec with such intent ?)

[nblei]

The veridian project (https://github.com/vivekmalneedi/veridian) has a yaml format for this purpose.

[gasrodriguez]

+1 for a "standard" filelist so the same can be used for other tools, eg verilator. It may use relative paths to the filelist location itself (as it called with -F instead of -f) and allow env vars substitution (to support pointing to files outside of the workspace).

Either passed as argument to the ls binary (with -F) or with a predefined file name is OK (maybe files.verible_ls?).

To be completely standard I think it should allow macro definitions with +define, include directories with +incdir, lib directories with -y, and (optionally) lib files extension with -libext.

Btw, would be awesome if the macros defined in the file list are honored by the ls somehow, eg turning off/graying out unreached code due to some `ifdef, or ignoring it by find definitions etc.

[SeanMcLoughlin]

A flag that is passed to the language server at start-up time?

I think this might be the best approach. DVT (a licensed SystemVerilog IDE and language server) uses build configuration files where you can specify filelists for the language server to care about.

[hzeller]

Assigning to Greg for now as it is close to the work he is currently doing.

[ljanyst]

Is anyone working on this and has made any progress? If not, I'd like to look into it.