Project motivation / VS Code / IDE support?

The issue names no repository files, tests, or entry points to inspect; start by reviewing the package purpose and its existing project documentation. A useful outcome would be a documented decision about IDE or VS Code support, including the intended users, ownership, and near- or long-term scope.

I was wondering, could you speak to the motivation or near/long-term goals of this project?

When first I saw this project emerge, I thought, "great, a company with real resources is finally putting some force behind PHP IDE support" - my hope or assumption was that this would be a first, important step towards proper language support in VS Code, which seemed natural, given the timing and the relative vacuum of useful IDE support for PHP.

Nothing more happened though? I've looked time and again to see which packages depend on this one, and still the only attempt there's been at IDE support is this one-man project:

https://github.com/felixfbecker/php-language-server

It looked promising, but it's a hobby project, and there's been no real activity on it for a couple of years now.

Other static analysis tools have tried to repurpose themselves, or third party contributors have attempted it, and the results are pretty mixed. (For one, they don't have an error tolerant parser, and they were largely designed with offline processing in mind.)

PHP support in VS Code remains on par with bad PHP tools at best. There's essentially only one IDE on the market that provides any meaningful IDE support for PHP today - I don't think I need to name it.

So the bar is relatively low or high, depending on whether you're looking at PHP IDEs at large, or the one IDE that actually "understands" PHP.

Does Microsoft have any plans to eventually do something in the PHP IDE space, like actually leverage this package for language server support for PHP? Or is that all up to the community?

Who or what is this package for, if the goal is not to achieve IDE support at some point in the future? While anyone is still interested in PHP. 😏