Re: [SPAM UNSURE] Maybe we're taking a wrong approach towards tree-sitter

[Ergus]

On Wed, Jul 28, 2021 at 07:43:03PM +0800, Andrei Kuznetsov wrote:
> Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> writes:
>
> > The tree-sitter runtime, that Emacs would link with, it implemented in
> > C, partly for this reason. It would be compiled with whatever Emacs is
> > compiled with, or the system compiler.
>
> Interesting.  I was not aware of that.
>
> > Some of the tree-sitter development tools are implemented in Rust; you
> > only need Rust if you are developing/fixing a grammar for a language.
>
> If I understand this correctly, it means one would require the Rust
> toolchain to support new languages in tree-sitter, or to improve
> existing support.  Would that really fit Emacs?  I think many people
> might not be comfortable learning such a large language and toolchain to
> develop editing tools for Emacs.
>
> Furthermore, is there any concrete reason this could not be done in
> Lisp?
I will say:
1) Performance (discussed in the previous thread):
2) Not reinvent the wheel.

Tree-sitter is very well maintained, optimized and with very specialized
algorithms; and we lack manpower to duplicate all that effort; and
implementing it in lisp won't really worth the efforts and may be
unmaintainable and slow.

Tree-sitter hopefully won't get abandoned in the future because many
editors use it right now (including neovim) and the community is very
dynamic.

Another advantage is that with tree-sitter as a back-end we could
officially (almost for free) support many languages that are currently
unsupported officially and may require a lot of effort to support them
in a minimal way (or currently supported in some inconsistent way, with
incoherent bindings/colors/indentations. Ex: Typescripts, Rust, Julia)

> Note: Somehow I sent a reply earlier, and not a follow-up.  I apologize
> for the duplicate.