Background
Highlighting of a Kotlin file prior to Kotlin 1.5 (and Kotlin IntelliJ plugins based on Kotlin before 1.5) in oversimplified way was sequential:- run a compiler for a kotlin file
- collects diagnostics (i.e. errors and warnings) for each PSI element
- highlight them in a file
Goal
Provide feedback on compilation errors (or warning) as soon as possible.Impl, details and trade-offs
The biggest concern in a provided highlighting process:why we have to wait till the end of kotlin file analysis to show errors and warnings?
If you ever compile some file in a console using
gcc or javac directly (w/o make or any other build managers), you definitely recall that compilers print diagnostic messages during compilation while entire compilation process for a single file could takes some seconds more.