Discussing the Features and Future of Lexical, an Elixir Language Server

Steve Cohen introduces Lexical, which is a new language server aimed at providing an enhanced coding experience for Elixir developers. Key features of Lexical include context-aware code completion, real-time compilation, advanced error highlighting, a variety of code actions, format assistance, and a feature for navigating to definitions. Lexical is distinct from other language servers due to its architecture that separates the language server's virtual machine from the user's project environment, leading to multiple benefits such as dependency isolation and support for different Elixir and Erlang versions. The 0.4.0 release adds hover support which shows documentation on functions and modules, has improvements in boot scripts, and integrates with Helix editor and .heex files. The developers are actively working on improving the indexing performance for large projects, have plans for a future plugin system, and are encouraging the community to contribute to optimizing its indexer.