Why isn't lua_ls able to get annotations straight from $VIMRUNTIME?

[d-r-a-b]

I was trying to get completion and documentation (hover()) setup with nvim-lspconfig for neovim and the vim.* namespace. Research led me to neodev.nvim and I saw that https://github.com/folke/neodev.nvim/blob/b1572ef7d09cb324bf0e284c3e363b1f55193e6b/.github/workflows/types.yml is basically pulling annotations from the neovim codebase and then the plugin is somehow surfacing those annotations. Why this seemingly roundabout approach? I had expected that setting workspace.library to vim.api.nvim_get_runtime_file("", true) would have been enough to get this info from $VIMRUNTIME but I was unable to get this to work. I'm sure there's a good reason but I'm trying to understand it and thereby expand my understanding of neovim, neovim plugins and LSPs.

Context:

I've been using vim/neovim without plugins and as a comparatively basic editor for a while now and it worked well for my own (usually 1-3 file) projects. Recently, I've been trying to work my way through neovim plugin codebases and felt that having LSP features would help to be able to get documentation and jump around the codebase so I started trying to set that up with folke's excellent lazy.nvim. I'm new to setting up plugins in general and also to lazy.nvim specifically, but things have overall been going well and I am just trying to flesh out my knowledge on my journey from neovim plugin/LSP neophyte to neovim plugin/LSP intermediate learner.

I copied the config block from lspconfig wiki, I set workspace.library to vim.api.nvim_get_runtime_file("", true) . Based on the comment "Make the server aware of Neovim runtime files" I would have thought this would work to get completions and hover() docs going. It does at least give me some completion with nvim-cmp-lsp but no documentation on vim.lsp.buf.hover(). Was this supposed to work?

Searching around brought me again to folke's neodev.nvim and this community. In general, I like to understand what my tools are doing for me and subscribe to a philosophy of reducing dependencies when possible. At the moment, neodev.nvim makes things work when before they didn't, so it's obviously a good value proposition to use it. However, it feels like neovim and lua-language-server should be able to do this without needing yet another plugin, so I wanted to understand better what brilliant things neodev.nvim might be doing to glue everything together. That led me to the types workflow that I linked above, and hence my question.

Thank you in advance to anyone who is able and willing to take the time to provide the benefit of their knowledge and experience, and thank you folke for providing this and many other wonderful plugins.

[folke]

Because the Neovim code-base is not just lua? Everything under vim.api.nvim_ is all c. lua_ls does't understand any of that

[d-r-a-b]

d'oh! Ignorance is a terrible thing. Thank you very much for taking the time to reply and helping me push back some of mine.

For whatever reason I just thought the core library would have been written in Lua, even though if I take a step back and really think about the evolution of neovim from vim that makes no sense. Trying to keep a bunch on things in my mental state right now to get some things working, and just completely didn't consider it.

Thanks again!