Language Server Protocol
The Language Server Protocol (LSP) is an open standard protocol that defines how language servers and development tools communicate to provide rich language features like code completion, go-to-definition, and error checking. It decouples language intelligence from specific editors or IDEs, allowing a single language server to support multiple clients. This enables consistent development experiences across different programming environments.
Developers should learn LSP when building or integrating language-specific tooling, as it standardizes editor support for programming languages, reducing the need to write separate plugins for each IDE. It's essential for creating cross-editor language extensions, improving developer productivity with features like IntelliSense, and is widely adopted in modern development tools like VS Code, Visual Studio, and JetBrains IDEs.