Hi all, I created a tool for running PMD analysis in background in Visual Studio Code, just for fun.

It's available at https://github.com/hvbargen/vscode-pmd-daemon.

While their are other integrations available for VS Code, I think this one is the only one which re-uses the Java process, avoiding startup overhead (except for the first analysis, of course).

Basically, It combines

• PMD
• Java's directory WatchService
• VS Code background task
• VS Code problem matcher

It demonstrates how it is possible to add functionality to VSCode without Typescript programming.
It's consists only of 1 Java source file and a tasks.json file.

Feel free to use the code or the ideas in one of the available extensions if you improve that extension to support other languages (not only APEX or Java) at the same time.