"Native" language support for R?

[DavisVaughan]

We've just recently added support for Air a very fast R code formatter (similar to Ruff and Biome), as a language server Zed extension. zed-industries/extensions#2128

I'm also the maintainer of tree-sitter-r.

Our Air users noticed that you need the R Zed extension for Zed to recognize R files so it can call Air on them
posit-dev/air#252 (comment)

That's this extension https://github.com/ocsmit/zed-r, which contributes both:

• R language support
• R language server support

I wanted to ask and see if the Zed devs would be open to having R language support natively supported in Zed itself.

I see the list of natively supported languages here:
https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/main/crates/languages/src

And I see how you register a native tree-sitter language here:

zed/crates/languages/src/lib.rs

Line 54 in 5c400da

languages.register_native_grammars([

And how you register varying amounts of native language support here:

zed/crates/languages/src/lib.rs

Lines 162 to 169 in 5c400da

	language!("bash", Vec::new(), bash_task_context());
	language!("c", vec![Arc::new(c::CLspAdapter) as Arc<dyn LspAdapter>]);
	language!("cpp", vec![Arc::new(c::CLspAdapter)]);
	language!(
	"css",
	vec![Arc::new(css::CssLspAdapter::new(node_runtime.clone())),]
	);
	language!("diff");

I believe I'm just advocating for language!("r") here - it's likely fine for extensions to provide language servers and other tools, but it would be great if native Zed could recognize and highlight R files without any additional support.

It currently feels like overkill to install https://github.com/ocsmit/zed-r and get both R language support and a full R language server, just to be able to run the Air extension. It is also likely that Air itself will eventually provide other language server features beyond just formatting in the future, in which case it would be nice for users to have a way to not get the language server that currently comes from zed-r.

If native R language support sounds okay to you all, I can probably do most of the work for it when I get some time over the next month or two.

Thanks!

[lict99]

In my view, natively supporting R in Zed presents some challenges. The primary hurdle is that the only Language Server Protocol (LSP) available for R is the 'languageserver' package, which inherently depends on R itself. This means that, unlike Pyright for Python, the 'languageserver' cannot operate independently. Additionally, R lacks the capability to create a virtual environment to run the 'languageserver', like py-lsp for Python.

[lict99]

To enable native support for R in Zed, it would be essential to have a solution that works out of the box. However, I don't believe such a solution currently exists.

[DavisVaughan]

FWIW I am aware of the challenges and was not asking for native LSP support.

I was only asking for native tree-sitter support. Which runs independently of R.

[notpeter]

We're not looking to add additional languages to the core supported set at this time. Although languages included in core are slightly more performant (tree-sitters compile to native code instead of wasm) this comes at the expense of increased compile times, increased code size in the editor binary and additional staff time reviewing PRs with any changes.

But I think the broader question you're asking is valid. You're providing an language server for files in Zed with language=R, but the only way to add language=R is by providing a tree-sitter. ocsmit/zed-r provides both the tree-sitter and language server support but users of the posit-dev/air extension only want the tree-sitter.

[DavisVaughan]

Yea you've nailed the problem with your 2nd paragraph.

In that case I think ideally what happens is:

• We convince the zed-r maintainer to ship only the tree-sitter support ("language" support) which gets R files recognized by Zed
• The language server support provided by {languageserver} that is currently in zed-r moves to a new extension
• We as Air developers get to recommend that users install the lightweight zed-r extension alongside the Air extension

[notpeter]

Yeah, we've traditionally thought about extensions as providing one or more of (themes, icon themes, languages, slash commands, etc) and while there is something simple about "install the Lua extension and get syntax highlighting and a working LSP", perhaps Zed user would be better served by installing two extensions: "Lua Language" (tree-sitter-lua) and "LuaLS LSP" (lua-language-server). And then people could also install an "EmmyLua LSP" (EmmyLuaAnalyzer) extension or whatever if they desired.

This would have the benefit of enabling the use case of as a more lightweight editor (e.g. syntax highlighting only, no LSPs) which is currently somewhat poorly supported in Zed currently. But it also means requiring users to install 2x as many extensions.

There is also a another option, which is to see if the maintainer of zed-r is open to adding you as a collaborator with the goal of enabling supporting both posit-dev/air and REditorSupport/languageserver in the extension. It's their project, so they are free to maintain it as they prefer, but thought I'd mention it.

Of note, github.com/zed-extensions is available as neutral place for hosting community maintained extensions as well. For example despite starting out in the zed tree, zed-extensions/ruby and zed-extensions/java are primarily maintained by community contributors, not Zed staff.

But I think your conclusions are correct, there is likely to be friction here in the future.