Getting started, and Gnome Builder, LSP and swift-format

[olifink]

First of all @david-swift congrats on AparokshaUI, it's an amazing piece of work and very well documented. I even found your tutorial pathway explained the "SwiftUI" concepts better than Apples official documentation. Well done 👏

I'm using it on Fedora/40 at the moment and here are a couple of things I found out that others perhaps might find helpful as well. I had the same issues with auto completion as described in #9 and decided to dig deeper as I also didn't quite understand the flatpak setup in builder.

With the setup described in the tutorial I didn't get proper autocompletion, only parts were working but crucially import Adwaita was failing:

After a lot of trial and error and fiddling with project settings, I could narrow it down to the fact that sourcekit-lsp relies not only on a properly built project for their indices, but also that swift build doesn't seem to provide them (fully?) when building with release configuration as specified in the build config in io.github.AparokshaUI.AdwaitaTemplate.json

Although -c release makes perfect sense to distribute the project, changing it to -c debug during development now also let LSP complete the missing Adwaita package:

Another option I found is to open a New Build Terminal (ctrl+alt+shift+t) and navigate to the source directory and do a manual swift build there. One note that you also might night to reopen the project in builder to make it recognize the index. I also tried --enable-index-store as a build option, but that didn't seem to help.

Now with this fixed I still had the remaining issue of the source formatter not working. This should be taken care of by swift-format however all I got was:

I'm afraid the I only workaround I found for this was with a local install of swift-format on my host system. I assume it might have something to do with the LSP and the formatter perhaps running in a different container environment and not having access to the same index files. I initially had a local build from the swift-format repo in conjunction with the fedora swift-lang rpm. However the rpm is still at swift 5.8 so in the end I found it much easier to just use homebrew on linux (shudder!) to have both swift 5.10 and swift-format on the host.

WIth that setup, even the formatter now work for me in Builder.

Screencast.from.2024-05-16.10-37-56.mp4

The only issue left for me is that hover documentation windows in Builders are extremely fickle and there is no keyboard shortcut yet to open a more permanent view, but that's a problem for all other project types as well, not only Aparoksha...

[david-swift]

Thank you so much! This is the solution!

I think I'll change the template repository to build for debugging and add instructions here advising to switch to release for publishing.

I don't know about the swift-format problem, maybe @JCWasmx86 does.

[JCWasmx86]

Regarding the formatter problem: This should only occur, if the swift code is invalid. Maybe it has something to do with version mismatches, e.g. the swift-format version shipped doesn't support a grammar yet, but it's supported in Swift already, I really don't know and I didn't do Swift for several months so I can't help debug this further

[olifink]

you're right @JCWasmx86 - I've checked the version of swift-format in the build container and it reports 508.0.0 while swift is at 5.10-RELEASE so I think just updating it in org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.swift5 should fix it.

So I suspect the culprit is swift-format-setup-offline.sh

[david-swift]

Thanks for reporting this, I'll update the SDK extension!

[olifink]

great!

also fyi - I was just looking into the Builder sources to see what it would take to support Swift as a project template:

It seems they have two template plugins at the moment, one is meson-templates the other is make-templates. Since SPM is neither I think it would not be too difficult to rework the smaller make plugin into a new swiftpm-template plugin and have it generate the content from AdwaitTemplate - that should make it much easier to get started without the search/replace currently needed.

so unless somebody is already looking into it, I will give it a try. My C is a little rusty but I should manage, maybe @JCWasmx86 you could review or help. I see you've already contributed into the builder codebase, which would be a first time for me.

[JCWasmx86]

I didn't contribute to Builder in the last few months, but I would be happy to help. You can DM me either on Matrix (Link in Profile) or Discord

[david-swift]

That would be very cool! Thanks in advance, @olifink and @JCWasmx86!

[david-swift]

Okay, so I fixed the auto completion problem in AparokshaUI/AdwaitaTemplate@d046bbc.

The swift format problem should be fixed with flathub/org.freedesktop.Sdk.Extension.swift5@branch/23.08...swift-lint-510-1-0 (swift-format -v outputs 510.1.0).

One question to @JCWasmx86 now that you're here: is there a reason you built SwiftLint from source instead of using the Linux download (https://github.com/realm/SwiftLint/releases/download/0.55.1/swiftlint_linux.zip)?

[olifink]

@david-swift well, yes and no 🫤 the swift-format is now the correct version in the platform SDK which is good, and it formats the file correctly when used directly in the build terminal, but I still get the same error banner trying to format from within the the ide.

Since I have Builder checked-out now anyway for the template work, I figured I could debug into the swift-format plugin. I probably need some time wrap my head about what's going... but what has been confusing for me so far is that the ide obviously picks up the swift-format binary on my host when it's there and fails when it's not there.

Debugging through create_run_context in plugins/swift-format/gbp-swiftformat-formatter.c seems to confirm that: it tries to find the swift-format via ide_runtime_contains_program_in_path and failing that, falls through to the run_on_host: label.

So, I'm guessing @JCWasmx86 that ide_config_get_runtime is actually only going to return the runtime container (that I would also get via New Runtime Terminal which doesn't have the swift-format installed) and not the build container with the sdk-extension for swift5...Maybe?

[olifink]

for reference:

  if (ide_context_has_project (context))
    {
      IdeConfigManager *config_manager = ide_config_manager_from_context (context);
      IdeConfig *config = ide_config_manager_get_current (config_manager);
      IdeRuntime *runtime;

      if ((runtime = ide_config_get_runtime (config)) &&
          ide_runtime_contains_program_in_path (runtime, argv0, NULL))
        {
          ide_runtime_prepare_to_build (runtime, NULL, run_context);
          ide_run_context_append_argv (run_context, argv0);

          return g_steal_pointer (&run_context);
        }
    }

run_on_host:
  ide_run_context_push_host (run_context);
  ide_run_context_append_argv (run_context, argv0);

[olifink]

yup, stepping through it confirms that ide_runtime_contains_program_in_path() returns 0 and then it tries to run something on host that doesn't exist (unless you install it explicitly as I did to get it working)

So I think we need to find a way to run it via the build container context somehow

[olifink]

hmm, reading through Hergerts Builder Developer Notebook, it sounds like ide_runtime_prepare_to_build should do that. So this must be called before ide_runtime_contains_program_in_path.

But even if I change that, the sdk's swift-format is still not found... 😕

[olifink]

quick update @david-swift and @JCWasmx86 - after spelunking a while through various Builder matrix and irc channels I finally raised it as an issue in gnome gitlab and maintainer Christian Hergert already pushed the fix.

I just checked it out and can confirm the swift-format issue is now fixed and works directly without the need of a local install.

So, I will now focus on a swift project template.