Microsoft has announced Pylance, a new language server for Python aimed to help programmers to write better Python code and to improve IntelliSense and Visual Studio Code support for the language.

Freely available on the Visual Studio Marketplace, Pylance is an implementation of the Language Server Protocol and uses Microsoft’s Pyright static type checking tool to provide rich type information. The extension also includes a number of auto-completion and type checking-enabling stubs for popular modules.

According to Microsoft, Pylance will eventually replace the Microsoft Python Language Server, originally released in 2018. At the moment, Microsoft has no plans to open source it, stated Microsoft program manager Savannah Ostrowski, which rules out Pylance use with third-party editors. This is a bit of a striking decision, which goes

Pylance represents a drastic improvement for the Python experience in Visual Studio Code, to which our team has dedicated months of work. The new, free language server offers increased performance and many more features. Because of that, our team’s focus will shift to Pylance to continue evolving it.

Besides providing type information in function signatures and when hovering on symbols, Pylance also provides smart-import suggestions for available and standard library modules.

As mentioned, Pyright powers Pylance’s type checking, which can be run with a basic or comprehensive set of rules over a codebase.

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