You really want your LSPs to run on the remote, especially with high-latency connections.

Why is that? How much data are we expecting the LSP to ingest?

For most projects my expectation is that all the source code gets quickly cached on my machine, and from then on querying a local LSP is much faster. Especially with high-latency connections.

That doesn't work if the remote is a different platform or architecture. Also, part of the point of running remotely is to do compute on the remote (often a powerful workstation or server), not locally.

You can use sshfs if you like. But there are many use cases where you have to do things remotely.

I'm just talking about the language server. Obviously it's great to do the real compiling remotely.

How often is my local machine going to have trouble running that? Having all that extra latency and bandwidth when I type sounds annoying.

For languages like Rust, the language server does compilations — it has to run on the remote because it has to know about OS/arch-specific details.

There's a bit of latency between when you type and when the language server shows or hides the squigglies. But it's less than the time it takes to compile stuff anyway.

One fewer tool to think about. It remembers the connections and instantly gives you access to a full-fledged editor on a remote server. It just works, and I don’t think about it twice, which is a huge win in my book. I’m good with the trade-offs.

Okay fair enough; just saying it seems like a reasonable alternative if you want to avoid fiddling with editors on remote machines.

It’s still not quite the same thing because it feels like you’re literally sitting at the remote machine; the code completion is there using an LSP that doesn’t have to pay a network cost, executables run locally which means you can be on a local Windows and remote Linux or vice-versa, and all in a super easy to use package that auto-restores the session whenever you come back even if you’ve put the machine to sleep.

By comparison, I’d say doing things over sshfs and terminals is the fiddling part.

VSC allows to debug the remote program, set breakpoints etc. How can you do it with just the editor?

Absolutely. It worked fine before vscode existed and it will work fine when the next hot button IDE comes along. I'm not sure why people keep reinventing the wheel and creating themselves new problems!