Multi Language Support in Interactive Window (Julia, Rust, CSharp, etc)

[DonJayamanne]

Workflow

• User has Julia kernel installed
• User installs our extension
• User opens Julia file & creates a cell marker using # %%
• Code lenses appear allowing user to run cell
• User runs cell (code) & interactive window appears
• Jupyter, Python, Python extension not required

Technical details

• Determine available kernels
• Based on available kernels, add support for cells code lenses in text editors
• Super easy to add support for julia, rust, csharp, fsharp, etc..
  (super easy changes to implement this feature)

Support Features

• Cell commands (run, run above, run below, add, insert, move, etc)
• Interactive window commands work
• Restart, interrupt, etc
• Basic Intellisense in prompt (comes from kernel - hence supported if kernel supports this)

Possible MVP

• No support for debugging
• No need of exposing APIs from extension
  • When other languages need features we can expose this API (debugging, variables, etc)
• Allow users to disable interactive window code lenses in other languages (if they dont need this)
• Via an experiment

Screenshots of prototype with it working in Julia, Rust, CSharp, fsharp

[andycraig]

This sounds great! R and Julia extensions include heuristics to determine what a 'block' of code is. For example, Ctrl-Enter on the first line of a for loop sends the whole for loop to the REPL. It's basically an alternative to the # %% cell approach. If this extension exposed a command that allowed a string to be sent to the Interactive Window, those heuristics could also be used with the Interactive Window. I would be happy to add something like that to this R extension.

It's pretty much what I was talking about here, although I was only thinking about Python at that time: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/issues/14192

[DonJayamanne]

@andycraig
Thanks for your feedback.

this extension exposed a command that allowed a string to be sent to the Interactive Window, those heuristics c

This is something we are planning on doing, see here https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-python/issues/14398

[andycraig]

@DonJayamanne Great to hear! I will follow progress on that issue.

[stevenlis]

This seems really existing. Since the notebook UI already supports other jupyter kernels. Does this "multi languages" means supporting any kernels listed in jupyer?
https://github.com/jupyter/jupyter/wiki/Jupyter-kernels

[DonJayamanne]

Yes, that's the plan.

[stevenlis]

@DonJayamanne I'm really looking forward to this! It's gotta be a game changer!

[DonJayamanne]

@davidanthoff is this something Julia users would be interested in. FYI here we're using the Julia kernel (Jupyter kernel) and getting most of the stuff working.

[davidanthoff]

So I'm a bit worried that we might be adding too many different ways to execute code from .jl files with this :)

The Julia extension has a pretty comprehensive story for running code that sits in .jl files, including cell support (but with a different cell marker, I think), inline viewing of results inside .jl files etc. I think one major issue would be that if a user has both the Julia and Jupyter extension installed at the same time, it becomes very unclear where code would execute from a .jl file, right?

So my gut feeling right now is that it would make more sense to just generally say that the Julia extension handles everything around .jl files. Curios what @pfitzseb and @ZacLN think about this?

[TotallyInformation]

Is there a timeline for this feature?

I would really like to use a Node.js/JavaScript capable kernel with vscode-jupyter, it would be massively useful.

---

OK, discovered for myself, couldn't find it in the documentation which is why I thought you couldn't do it. You need to have VSCode insiders for this to work it seems.

npm install -g tslab
tslab install --version
tslab install
jupyter kernelspec list

Then restart VScode. Then you have access to 2 new kernels for js and ts.

Trying that on the current live version of vscode failed.

[stevenlis]

Would be "massively useful" for my workflow as well. Could you please give us an update?

[DonJayamanne]

Would be "massively useful" for my workflow

Which language?

[stevenlis]

@DonJayamanne R, Julia, Stata. This is the kernel I use most recently: https://github.com/kylebarron/stata_kernel/