Tools that support the development process of software are crucial for ensuring the quality, security, and timeliness of software. This is especially important in the context of smart contracts, which are self-executing programs in a distributed environment. As a result, smart contracts require a high level of security to protect against vulnerabilities that could compromise the integrity of the contract.

The Language Server Protocol (LSP) is a protocol developed by Microsoft to standardize the communication between development tools, such as the editors and IDEs. The language server provides language-specific services such as code completion and error checking. The LSP has become increasingly popular in the development community, with support from a growing number of programming languages and development tools.

By leveraging the LSP, Kadena provides a better user experience and increased support for the development of secure contracts within the developer’s preferred integrated development environment.

While previous tooling-support was mainly limited to the Atom IDE, the LSP server now allows integration with a wide variety of editors, including Emacs and vim.

The current support for the Language Server Protocol includes a range of useful features for developing smart contracts securely. One of these features is document diagnostics, which can provide real-time feedback on potential issues and vulnerabilities within the code. In addition to standard diagnostics, this support also includes Pact traces, which allow developers to trace the execution of a Pact smart contract and identify any issues that may arise during runtime. Another feature is auto-completion of natives, which can save time and reduce the risk of syntax errors. Finally, documentation over natives via hover information provides additional context for developers, allowing them to understand the available functions and parameters for specific natives.

By combining these features with other LSP-enabled tools, developers can improve the security and quality of their smart contracts, while also increasing productivity and reducing the risk of errors.

Future developments for the LSP server are focused on improving the development experience and security of smart contracts. One feature currently in development is jump to definition, which allows developers to quickly navigate to the definition of a function or variable within their code. This can save time and improve productivity, especially for larger and more complex projects. Another area of focus is formal verification code actions, which will enable automated verification support of smart contracts using Pacts formal method. This can help identify potential security vulnerabilities and ensure that the contract behaves as intended.

Finally, future developments will include continued integration with Visual Studio Code (VSCode), a popular choice for Smart Contract development. But we are also looking into support for IntelliJ. We can now even look into options to create our IDE at one point in time so that we can integrate Smart contract deployment in your development environment.

With continued support for LSP, Pact users can benefit from a range of language features and security analysis functionality within their preferred IDE. Overall, these developments demonstrate a commitment to improving the development experience and security of smart contracts using LSP-enabled tools.