Setup Guide

This guide gives a simplified, opinionated setup for developers contributing to wgsl-analyzer using Visual Studio Code. It enables developers to make changes and Visual Studio Code Insiders to test those changes. This guide will assume you have Visual Studio Code and Visual Studio Code Insiders installed.

Prerequisites

Since wgsl-analyzer is a Rust project, you will need to install Rust. You can download and install the latest stable version of Rust.

Step-by-Step Setup

1. Fork the wgsl-analyzer repository and clone the fork to your local machine.
2. Open the project in Visual Studio Code.
3. Open a terminal and run cargo build to build the project.
4. Install the language server locally by running the following command:

cargo xtask install --server --code-bin code-insiders --dev-rel

In the output of this command, there should be a file path provided to the installed binary on your local machine. It should look something like the following output below:

Installing <path-to-wgsl-analyzer-binary>
Installed package `wgsl-analyzer v0.0.0 (<path-to-wgsl-analyzer-binary>)` (executable `wgsl-analyzer.exe`)

In Visual Studio Code Insiders, you will want to open your User Settings (JSON) from the Command Palette. From there, you should ensure that the wgsl-analyzer.server.path key is set to the <path-to-wgsl-analyzer-binary>. This will tell Visual Studio Code Insiders to use the locally installed version that you can debug.

The User Settings (JSON) file should contain the following:

{
    "wgsl-analyzer.server.path": "<path-to-wgsl-analyzer-binary>"
}

Now you should be able to make changes to wgsl-analyzer in Visual Studio Code and then view the changes in Visual Studio Code Insiders.

Debugging wgsl-analyzer

The simplest way to debug wgsl-analyzer is to use the eprintln! macro. The reason why we use eprintln! instead of println! is because the language server uses stdout to send messages. Instead, debug using stderr.

An example debugging statement could go into the main_loop.rs file which can be found at crates/wgsl-analyzer/src/main_loop.rs. Inside the main_loop add the following eprintln! to test debugging wgsl-analyzer:

eprintln!("Hello, world!");

Now we run cargo build and cargo xtask install --server --code-bin code-insiders --dev-rel to reinstall the server.

Now on Visual Studio Code Insiders, we should be able to open the Output tab on our terminal and switch to wgsl-analyzer Language Server to see the eprintln! statement we just wrote.

If you are able to see your output, you now have a complete workflow for debugging wgsl-analyzer.