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Comment by as-cii

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Comment by as-cii

Hey, Antonio here. Co-founder at Zed.

Sorry that we haven't replied to that GitHub issue yet. We try our best to listen to the community (here, on GitHub, on Discord, ...), but we're a small team and, admittedly, it's tricky to keep up with everything.

I agree that we should ask users for consent before downloading language servers (and other executables).

For everybody who's come across the ticket here or on Reddit and hasn't worked with the Zed codebase yet, let me provide some context on how language support is implemented.

In Zed, we have three ways of supporting a language (and its language servers):

1. Extensions that users can install from the `zed-extensions` repository [0]

2. Pre-bundled extensions that ship with the Zed binary, but still need to be installed [1]

3. Built-in language support [2].

For (2) and (3), the code is owned by the Zed team and we make a conscious effort to review contributions from the community in that area.

That code can automatically download language servers, but we try to vet which exact scripts/binaries are downloaded from where. For example: we heavily use rust-analyzer ourselves and keep up to date with its releases, the Go language server `gopls` is downloaded from the Go team using the official `go` tooling, the ESLint language server comes from Microsoft, etc.

For the longest time, we only had built-in language support (3). A couple of months ago, we shipped extensions for Zed (point 1 and 2 above, parts of it described in [3]). The goal was for built-in language support (3) to gradually move to pre-bundled extensions (2) so that users had the ability to choose which ones to install. We did make some progress, but we haven't ported all languages yet.

We're a small team and can only do so many things at once. So after investing quite a bit of time into extensions, we chose to pause that work and invest into other areas for a while (porting Zed to Linux, for example). Once those areas are in a better state, we plan to come back to extensions, build them out some more, and port the remaining languages.

So, TL;DR: we hear you loud and clear. We try to vet things that are currently installed automatically. But we agree that we should ask users whether they want to install arbitrary binaries on their computer. We also plan to transition all language support to manually-installed extensions once we finish other projects.

[0]: https://github.com/zed-industries/extensions

[1]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/main/extensions

[2]: https://github.com/zed-industries/zed/tree/main/crates/langu...

[3]: https://zed.dev/blog/language-extensions-part-1

Replies as-cii · 2024-07-08
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