Aurélien Geron (Oct 29 2026 at 10:32): Aurélien Geron (Oct 29 2026 at 10:32):I'd like to update the Install section of the website to provide some info on developer tools for Roc. What do you recommend?
I'm aware of:
roc experimental-lsp, so it keeps up with nightlies.Did I miss any? Which of these are actively maintained? In a recent conversation (#contributing > roc-vscode-unofficial), Ivan said he was looking for volunteers to take over his repo, and @Will Hawkins kindly offered to help. I'm not sure what the status is.
Are there any other editor extensions that you like using with Roc?
My goal is not necessarily to list every possible tool, but to help the users get up and running and productive quickly.
Richard Feldman (Oct 29 2026 at 12:30):I think roc-spec by @Niclas Ahden fits that description
Richard Feldman (Oct 29 2026 at 12:37):for future reference, things I want to end up being in roc itself (sometime after 0.1.0) include:
Richard Feldman (Oct 29 2026 at 12:37):what's a bundler btw? :sweat_smile:
Steve Howell (Oct 29 2026 at 13:00):Richard Feldman said:
what's a bundler btw? :sweat_smile:
haha: https://youtu.be/E82ly38YEEQ?si=6p45_q247K_mvPXK&t=392
Anton (Oct 29 2026 at 14:41):In a recent conversation (contributing > roc-vscode-unofficial), Ivan said he was looking for volunteers to take over his repo, and Will Hawkins kindly offered to help. I'm not sure what the status is.
For roc vscode, I just need to do some final testing with roc-lang/roc-vscode and publish it.
Will Hawkins (Oct 29 2026 at 14:54):Aurélien Geron said:
I'd like to update the Install section of the website to provide some info on developer tools for Roc. What do you recommend?
Editor extension
I'm aware of:
- Zed:
- The Roc extension for Zed by Alf Richter.
- VSCode
- The Unofficial Roc extension for VSCode by Ivan Demchenko.
- koliyo/vscode-roc by Nils Hjelte, a port from Alf's Zed extension.
- Hasnep/roc-vscode by Hannes, also a port from Alf's Zed extension.
- lukewilliamboswell/roc-vscode-unofficial by Luke Boswell, a fork of Ivan's extension.
- v4rm4n/roc-vscode by Adityavarman Manjunath, which is a thin wrapper around
roc experimental-lsp, so it keeps up with nightlies.Did I miss any? Which of these are actively maintained? In a recent conversation (#contributing > roc-vscode-unofficial), Ivan said he was looking for volunteers to take over his repo, and Will Hawkins kindly offered to help. I'm not sure what the status is.
Thanks for noticing my offer!! I had not heard back from @Ivan Demchenko , so I didn't want to overstep my bounds. I am still very, very eager to help, but I also don't want to go where I am not needed/wanted. If the group thinks that it would be okay/reasonable, I'd be more than happy to fork @Ivan Demchenko 's work and start from there! I know how busy that they are and I don't want to make more work for them. On the other hand, I am nervous about having "another" tool out there. If the group has coalesced around one of the VSCode tools, I'd love to contribute my energy there!
Thank you @Aurélien Geron for putting together these resources!! As you said, documentation of this kind is what truly makes a language welcoming!
Aurélien Geron (Oct 29 2026 at 18:10):Richard Feldman said:
what's a bundler btw? :sweat_smile:
Oh sorry, I meant an installer creator.
Richard Feldman (Oct 29 2026 at 18:35):ahh gotcha!
Richard Feldman (Oct 29 2026 at 18:35):yeah I kinda assumed those would be agnostic to the language that produced the binary
Richard Feldman (Oct 29 2026 at 18:36):but I've never actually used one, so I don't really know :smile:
Aurélien Geron (Oct 29 2026 at 18:50):Yeah, I used one a very long time ago. The process went something like this:
Most of this doesn't really affect Roc itself, except perhaps the very first step: it would be nice to have a command to fetch all dependencies. I've already run into this with Exercism: their test runner runs in a container with no internet access, so the image must contain every single package and platform that the exercises need. Currently, the Dockerfile installs Roc, then it runs a small Roc app that imports all the necessary packages, then it also runs a Roc program for each possible platform. This pulls all these dependencies into the Roc cache so it's part of the Docker image. It would be nice to be able to just run roc download-dependencies <path> and let it download every single dependency in the Roc files within that path, as well as their own dependencies.
Such a command would also help with an installer creator: the machine we're installing to may have restricted internet access, so it's good to have the installer contain every single dependency.
Richard Feldman (Oct 29 2026 at 19:57):yeah I think we talked about a feature like that in another thread - I think maybe the proposed subcommand might have been roc fetch maybe?
Anton (Oct 29 2026 at 20:13):
Anton (Oct 29 2026 at 20:16): Romain Lepert (Oct 30 2026 at 06:32):@Richard Feldman when it comes to developer tools, will roc have built-in statistical benchmarking for functions or should it remain separate and act on executables ?
Richard Feldman (Oct 30 2026 at 14:08):I'm not sure yet
Last updated: Nov 04 2026 at 18:54 UTC