Re: cc-mode fontification feels random

[Daniel Colascione]

On 6/11/21 1:27 PM, Stefan Monnier wrote:

> > For what I know about tree-sitter it does not provide the parsers with
> > the library.
> Of course, not, how could it?  There's a never-ending stream of
> programming languages out there.
>
> I don't see why you think that's a problem,

It's not just licensing.

Another problem with stock tree-sitter is that it makes Emacs less 
self-hosting. Tree-sitter grammars are written in JavaScript. You don't 
need JavaScript to use a grammar, but you do need JavaScript to 
customize a grammar. In addition, Tree-sitter compiles these JavaScript 
grammars to C. To use a customized grammar, an Emacs user would have to 
run node.js (or equally capable JS environment), generate C code, 
compile that C code, and load it into Emacs as a module. That's a big 
departure from the traditional approach to Emacs customization.

These technical choices on the part of the Tree-sitter people are 
unfortunate. I'd prefer an elisp reimplementation of the Tree-sitter 
algorithms, but I doubt we're going to get that any time soon.

Maybe Tree-sitter could be changed to generate an elisp parser and 
compile parsers in a lightweight JS environment like Duktape.