I was considering buying a new dev machine a few months ago. I'd been hearing great things about the new Ryzen chips with 16+ cores, but then I saw the price tag and thought about what percentage of the time I'd even be fully utilizing that many cores: probably less than an hour or two a day, on average, if that. And then there's the cost of powering it. It would be much less expensive up front to just spin up a VM in GCP and suspend it when I'm not coding. The trick would just be making the experience as seamless as possible (maybe build an LSP proxy that automatically suspends/resumes the VM?). Nelson seems to be solving the build performance issue with llama, but I'm curious about running LSP servers in the cloud.
The thing about LSP is that you really want to minimize latency for the user, which local is still the fastest at. Particularly with newer incremental completion engines that don't need to re-read the entire giant project.
While you do want your build to be as fast as possible, the constraint is often throughput and not latency.
