LSIF.dev

What is LSIF?

LSIF is a standard format for persisted code analyzer output. It allows a code viewing client (e.g., an editor or code browser) to provide features like autocomplete, go to definition, find references, and similar, without requiring a language analyzer to perform those computations in real-time. Today, several companies are working to support its growth, including Sourcegraph and GitHub/Microsoft, and the protocol is beginning to be used to power a rapidly growing list of language intelligence tools. See below for details on and links to current indexer implementations.

When is LSIF useful?

For many repositories, the only two build environments that understand the code well enough to provide code intelligence are your editor and CI. Most code browsers don’t have access to either of those environments, so they use heuristics to provide code intelligence.

With LSIF, a build step in CI can dump information about the code to a file which can be transported anywhere. For example, code browsers only need that LSIF dump in order to provide hover tooltips, jump-to-definition, and find-references. This has many benefits:

• It’s fast because all of the information is precomputed
• It’s precise because the information comes from an environment which understands the code

Current implementations

LSIF is growing - fast. See tables below for the latest on adoption.

Qualifications:

To be included on this list, LSIF indexers must be fully open source.

LSIF Indexers

Language	Maintainer	Repository	Hover documentation	Definitions	References	Cross-file	Cross-repository	Status	Notes
C++/C/Obj-C	Sourcegraph	github.com/sourcegraph/lsif-clang	check	check	check	check		Beta
C#	@tcz717	github.com/tcz717/LsifDotnet	check	check	check	check		Development	Tested only on Windows.
Dart	Workiva	github.com/Workiva/lsif_indexer	check	check	check	check		Beta
Dart	Sourcegraph	github.com/sourcegraph/lsif-dart	check	check	check	check		Beta	Only supports doc hovers
Go	Sourcegraph	github.com/sourcegraph/lsif-go	check	check	check	check	check	Ready
Haskell	@mpickering	github.com/mpickering/hie-lsif	check	check	check	check		Unknown
Java	Sourcegraph	github.com/sourcegraph/lsif-java	check	check	check	check	check	Ready	Supports Maven, Gradle and sbt.
Java	Microsoft	github.com/Microsoft/lsif-java	check	check	check			Development	Maven only
Jsonnet	Sourcegraph	github.com/sourcegraph/lsif-jsonnet		check		check		Development	Proof of concept implementation
Kotlin	Sourcegraph	github.com/sourcegraph/lsif-java	check	check	check	check	check	Ready	Supports Gradle.
OCaml	Sourcegraph	github.com/rvantonder/lsif-ocaml	check	check		check		Development	Only supports type hovers
Python	Sourcegraph	github.com/sourcegraph/lsif-py	check	check	check	check		DevelopmentUnstable
Rust	Rust Analyzer	github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer	check	check	check	check		Unknown	Use the indexing command rust-analyzer lsif . > dump.lsif
Scala	Sourcegraph	github.com/sourcegraph/lsif-java	check	check	check	check	check	Ready	Supports sbt.
TypeScript	Sourcegraph	github.com/sourcegraph/lsif-node	check	check	check	check	check	Ready	Also supports JavaScript
TypeScript	Microsoft	github.com/microsoft/lsif-node	check	check	check	check	check	Unknown

Contact us

LSIF.dev is maintained by Sourcegraph.

To suggest additions or to update the status of a project, please file issues or submit PRs on this project at github.com/lsif/lsif.github.io.

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