Run null-ls as a standalone LSP server

[eshepelyuk]

Hello

My question is a pure technical curiosity, dont take it seriously.

So, is it in theory possible to run null-ls(in neovim, ofc) as a standalone LSP server, so null ls provided data can be leveraged by other editors supporting LSP, like VS code e.g.

[jose-elias-alvarez]

It is indeed possible in theory (and something I've thought about doing for fun). Early versions of null-ls actually spawned another instance of Neovim as a headless server (and then overwrote the client's methods to avoid actually communicating between processes, which is the same approach null-ls uses now). It would be a matter of adapting the code to keep the server alive and communicate via stdio, though we'd lose all of the extra information we currently use about editor state.

Apart from getting to use Lua and avoiding another external dependency, there wouldn't really be any advantages vs. efm-langserver or diagnostic-languageserver. VS Code already makes it easy to add new providers for things like diagnostics and formatting without pretending to be an LSP server, so aside from LSP compliance, there's not much of an advantage there, either.