Overview

The F# Language Service (FSharp.Editor, using FSharp.Compiler.Service) is designed to support tooling in Visual Studio and other IDEs. This document gives an overview of the features supported and notes on their technical characteristics.

Kinds of data processed and served in F# tooling

The following tables are split into two categories: syntactic and semantic. They contain common kinds of information requested, the kind of data that is involved, and roughly how expensive the operation is in terms of expected memory allocation and CPU processing.

IDE actions based on syntax

Action	Data inspected	Data returned	Expected CPU/Allocations (S/M/L/XL)
Syntactic Classification	Current doc's source text	Text span and classification type for each token in the document	S
Breakpoint Resolution	Current doc's syntax tree	Text span representing where breakpoints were resolved	S
Debugging data tip info	Current doc's source text	Text span representing the token being inspected	S
Brace pair matching	Current doc's source text	Text spans representing brace pairs that match in the input document	S
"Smart" indentation	Current doc's source text	Indentation location in a document	S
Code fixes operating only on syntax	Current doc's source text	Small text change for document	S
XML doc template generation	Current doc's syntax tree	Small (usually) text change for document	S
Brace pair completion	Current doc's source text	Additional brace pair inserted into source text	S
Souce document navigation	Current doc's syntax tree	"Navigation Items" with optional child navigation items containing ranges in source code	S
Code outlining	Current doc's source text	Text spans representing blocks of F# code that are collapsable as a group	S - M
Editor formatting	Current doc's source text	New source text for the document	S - L
Syntax diagnostics	Current doc's source text	List of diagnostic data including the span of text corresponding to the diagnostic	S
Global construct search and navigation	All syntax trees for all projects	All items that match a user's search pattern with spans of text that represent where a given item is located	S-L

You likely noticed that nearly all of the syntactical operations are marked S. Aside from extreme cases, like files with 50k lines or higher, syntax-only operations typically finish very quickly. In addition to being computationally inexpensive, they are also run asynchronously and free-threaded.

Editor formatting is a bit of an exception. Most IDEs offer common commands for format an entire document, and although they also offer commands to format a given text selection, users typically choose to format the whole document. This means an entire document has to be inspected and potentially rewritten based on often complex rules. In practice this isn't bad when working with a document that has already been formatted, but it can be expensive for larger documents with strange stylistic choices.

Most of the syntax operations require an entire document's source text or parse tree. It stands to reason that this could be improved by operating on a diff of a parse tree instead of the whole thing. This is likely a very complex thing to implement though, since none of the F# compiler infrastructure works in this way today.

IDE actions based on semantics

Action	Data inspected	Data returned	Expected CPU/Allocations (S/M/L/XL)
Most code fixes	Current document's typecheck data	Set (1 or more) of suggested text replacements	S-M
Semantic classification	Current document's typecheck data	Spans of text with semantic classification type for all constructs in a document	S-L
Code generation / refactorings	Current document's typecheck data and/or current resolved symbol/symbols	Text replacement(s)	S-L
Code completion	Current document's typecheck data and currently-resolved symbol user is typing at	List of all symbols in scope that are "completable" based on where completion is invoked	S-L
Editor tooltips	Current document's typecheck data and resolved symbol where user invoked a tooltip	F# tooltip data based on inspecting a type and its declarations, then pretty-printing them	S-XL
Diagnostics based on F# semantics	Current document's typecheck data	Diagnostic info for each symbol with diagnostics to show, including the range of text associated with the diagnostic	M-XL
Symbol highlighting in a document	Current document's typecheck data and currently-resolved symbol where user's caret is located	Ranges of text representing instances of that symbol in the document	S-M
Semantic navigation (for example, Go to Definition)	Current document's typecheck data and currently-resolved symbol where the user invoked navigation	Location of a symbol's declaration	S-M
Rename	Graph of all projects that use the symbol that rename is triggered on and the typecheck data for each of those projects	List of all uses of all symbols that are to be renamed	S-XL
Find all references	Graph of all projects that Find References is triggered on and the typecheck data for each of those projects	List of all uses of all symbols that are found	S-XL
Unused value/symbol analysis	Typecheck data for the current document	List of all symbols that aren't a public API and are unused	S-M
Unused open analysis	Typecheck data for the current document and all symbol data brought into scope by each open declaration	List of open declarations whose symbols it exposes aren't used in the current document	S-L
Missing open analysis	Typecheck data for the current document, resolved symbol with an error, and list of available namespaces or modules	List of candidate namespaces or modules that can be opened	S-M
Misspelled name suggestion analysis	Typecheck data for the current document and resolved symbol with an error	List of candidates that are in scope and best match the misspelled name based on a string distance algorithm	S-M
Name simplification analysis	Typecheck data for the current document and all symbol data brought into scope by each open declaration	List of text changes available for any fully- or partially-qualified symbol that can be simplified	S-XL

You likely noticed that every cost associated with an action has a range. This is based on two factors:

1. If the semantic data being operated on is cached
2. How much semantic data must be processed for the action to be completed

Most actions are S if they operate on cached data and the compiler determines that no data needs to be re-computed. The size of their range is influenced largely by the kind of semantic operations each action has to do, such as:

• Typechecking a single document and processing the resulting data
• Typechecking a document and its containing project and then processing the resulting data
• Resolving a single symbol in a document
• Resolving the definition of a single symbol in a codebase
• Inspecting all symbols brought into scope by a given open declaration
• Inspecting all symbols in a document
• Inspecting all symbols in all documents contained in a graph of projects

For example, commands like Find All References and Rename can be cheap if a codebase is small, hence the lower bound being S. But if the symbol in question is used across many documents in a large project graph, they are very expensive because the entire graph must be crawled and all symbols contained in its documents must be inspected.

In contrast, actions like highlighting all symbols in a document aren't terribly expensive even for very large files. That's because the symbols to be inspected are ultimately only in a single document.