Font Locking issue: Need help/advice

[Serghei Iakovlev]

Hello,

I am creating a new mode called zephir-mode [1].  The main goals of
this mode is to provide syntax highlighting, indentation, movement,
navigation support and Imenu for Zephir [2] language.

Currently I'm working on fontification and faced a strange
behavior.  Please see animated GIF I attached to this email to
demonstrate the issue.  The code responsible for fontification
demonstrated in GIF is located here [3].  I used GNU Emacs 27.0.90
to demonstrate and test this issue.

I'd like to provide the patterns I'm trying to catch:

  protected foo;
  protected static foo;
  public bar = 1;
  private baz = [];
  private baz = [] { set };
  protectd foo { get };
  public static bar = 42;
  private static baz = 13 { get };
  private baz = 13 { get, set, toString };

However, my tests passes without any problem [4]. So I need
help here.

Actually I have few questions related to this issue:

- This is my first experience with complex object fontification and
  I suspect that I have chosen an insufficiently effective or
  concise approach/tool/API.  Could someone take a look over used
  approach and provide a small feedback about the overall strategy?

- What happens on the GIF?  How I can fix this? How to avoid similar
  in the future?


- In fact, I would like to be able to independently receive the
  answer to the question "Why did this happen?" so I'm interesting
  on debugging practices.  How to debug similar issues?

[1]: https://github.com/zephir-lang/zephir-mode
[2]: https://zephir-lang.com
[3]:
https://github.com/zephir-lang/zephir-mode/blob/0.6.0/zephir-mode.el#L850-L901
[4]:
https://github.com/zephir-lang/zephir-mode/blob/0.6.0/test/test-zephir-mode-font-lock.el#L239-L266

-- 
Serghei

zephir-mode-font-lock-issue.gif
Description: GIF image