> why does an IDE need to be designed for a language anyway
People want their IDE to do all the ancillary tasks, and Go builds most of these into the core, so it's a good first target. You can be "feature complete" without complexity.
Consider the case of a C++ IDE. Which compiler do you support; gcc, clang, msvc? Which build system do you support; Bazel, make, cmake, gyp, autotools? Which C++ standard version does the syntax highlighter support; can you change it per-project? If you do change it per-project, how do you configure this?
If you pick some opinionated subset, your userbase is 0 people. If you support everything people want, you have 30 people working on it for 10 years and you still fail.
People want their IDE to do all the ancillary tasks, and Go builds most of these into the core, so it's a good first target. You can be "feature complete" without complexity.
Consider the case of a C++ IDE. Which compiler do you support; gcc, clang, msvc? Which build system do you support; Bazel, make, cmake, gyp, autotools? Which C++ standard version does the syntax highlighter support; can you change it per-project? If you do change it per-project, how do you configure this?
If you pick some opinionated subset, your userbase is 0 people. If you support everything people want, you have 30 people working on it for 10 years and you still fail.