ARCHITECTURE.md

Architecture

This document describes high-level architecture of rust-analyzer. If you want to familiarize yourself with the code base, you are just in the right place!

The Big Picture

On the highest level, rust-analyzer is a thing which accepts input source code from the client and produces a structured semantic model of the code.

More specifically, input data consists of a set of test files ((PathBuf, String) pairs) and an information about project structure, the so called CrateGraph. Crate graph specifies which files are crate roots, which cfg flags are specified for each crate (TODO: actually implement this) and what are dependencies between the crate. The analyzer keeps all these input data in memory and never does any IO. Because the input data is source code, which typically measures in tens of megabytes at most, keeping all input data in memory is OK.

A "structured semantic model" is basically an object-oriented representation of modules, functions and types which appear in the source code. This representation is fully "resolved": all expressions have types, all references are bound to declarations, etc.

The client can submit a small delta of input data (typically, a change to a single file) and get a fresh code model which accounts for changes.

Underlying engine makes sure that model is computed lazily (on-demand) and can be quickly updated for small modifications.

Code generation

Some of the components of this repository are generated through automatic processes. These are outlined below:

• gen-syntax: The kinds of tokens are reused in several places, so a generator is used. We use tera templates to generate the files listed below, based on the grammar described in grammar.ron:
  • ast/generated.rs in ra_syntax based on ast/generated.tera.rs
  • syntax_kinds/generated.rs in ra_syntax based on syntax_kinds/generated.tera.rs

Code Walk-Through

crates/ra_syntax

Rust syntax tree structure and parser. See RFC for some design notes.

• rowan library is used for constructing syntax trees.
• grammar module is the actual parser. It is a hand-written recursive descent parsers, which produces a sequence of events like "start node X", "finish not Y". It works similarly to kotlin parser, which is a good source for inspiration for dealing with syntax errors and incomplete input. Original libsyntax parser is what we use for the definition of the Rust language.
• parser_api/parser_impl bridges the tree-agnostic parser from grammar with rowan trees. This is the thing that turns a flat list of events into a tree (see EventProcessor)
• ast a type safe API on top of the raw rowan tree.
• grammar.ron RON description of the grammar, which is used to generate syntax_kinds and ast modules, using cargo gen-syntax command.
• algo: generic tree algorithms, including walk for O(1) stack space tree traversal (this is cool) and visit for type-driven visiting the nodes (this is double plus cool, if you understand how Visitor works, you understand rust-analyzer).

Test for ra_syntax are mostly data-driven: tests/data/parser contains a bunch of .rs (test vectors) and .txt files with corresponding syntax trees. During testing, we check .rs against .txt. If the .txt file is missing, it is created (this is how you update tests). Additionally, running cargo gen-tests will walk the grammar module and collect all //test test_name comments into files inside tests/data directory.

See #93 for an example PR which fixes a bug in the grammar.

crates/ra_db

We use [salsa][https://github.com/salsa-rs/salsa] crate for incremental and on-demand computation. Roughly, you can think of salsa as a key-value store, but it also can compute derived values using specified functions. The ra_db crate provides a basic infrastructure for interacting with salsa. Crucially, it defines most of the "input" queries: facts supplied by the client of the analyzer. Reading the docs of the ra_db::input module should be useful: everything else is strictly derived from those inputs.

crates/ra_hir

HIR provides high-level "object oriented" access to Rust code.

The principal difference between HIR and syntax trees is that HIR is bound to a particular crate instance. That is, it has cfg flags and features applied (in theory, in practice this is to be implemented). So, the relation between syntax and HIR is many-to-one. The source_binder modules is responsible for guessing a HIR for a particular source position.

Underneath, HIR works on top of salsa, using a HirDatabase trait.

crates/ra_analysis

A stateful library for analyzing many Rust files as they change. AnalysisHost is a mutable entity (clojure's atom) which holds the current state, incorporates changes and handles out Analysis --- an immutable and consistent snapshot of world state at a point in time, which actually powers analysis.

One interesting aspect of analysis is its support for cancellation. When a change is applied to AnalysisHost, first all currently active snapshots are cancelled. Only after all snapshots are dropped the change actually affects the database.

crates/ra_lsp_server

An LSP implementation which uses ra_analysis for managing state and ra_editor for actually doing useful stuff.

See #79 as an example of PR which adds a new feature to ra_editor and exposes it to ra_lsp_server.

crates/ra_editor

All IDE features which can be implemented if you only have access to a single file. ra_editor could be used to enhance editing of Rust code without the need to fiddle with build-systems, file synchronization and such.

In a sense, ra_editor is just a bunch of pure functions which take a syntax tree as input.

The tests for ra_editor are #[cfg(test)] mod tests unit-tests spread throughout its modules.

crates/gen_lsp_server

A language server scaffold, exposing a synchronous crossbeam-channel based API. This crate handles protocol handshaking and parsing messages, while you control the message dispatch loop yourself.

Run with RUST_LOG=sync_lsp_server=debug to see all the messages.

crates/ra_cli

A CLI interface to rust-analyzer.

crate/tools

Custom Cargo tasks used to develop rust-analyzer:

• cargo gen-syntax -- generate ast and syntax_kinds
• cargo gen-tests -- collect inline tests from grammar
• cargo install-code -- build and install VS Code extension and server

editors/code

VS Code plugin

Common workflows

To try out VS Code extensions, run cargo install-code. This installs both the ra_lsp_server binary and VS Code extension. To install only the binary, use cargo install --path crates/ra_lsp_server --force

To see logs from the language server, set RUST_LOG=info env variable. To see all communication between the server and the client, use RUST_LOG=gen_lsp_server=debug (will print quite a bit of stuff).

To run tests, just cargo test.

To work on VS Code extension, launch code inside editors/code and use F5 to launch/debug. To automatically apply formatter and linter suggestions, use npm run fix.