Re: Call for volunteers: add tree-sitter support to major modes

[Po Lu]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> No, they aren't: witness the requests to support ligatures in program
> sources, which are driven by modern fonts like Iosevka and FiraCode.

People request it, yes, but that does not make it directly relevant to
programming.

> Can you imagine a development environment nowadays that is unable to
> update or upgrade optional packages or install new optional packages?
> I can't.

That is the business of the package manager, not Emacs.

> You see only the aspects that support your POV, and dismiss the rest.
> One aspect you ignore is the fact that Semantic is where it is today
> because people who developed it stopped its development.  This is
> directly relevant to your proposal to develop parsing capabilities as
> part of Emacs -- the result in the long run will be the same, because
> no one stays in Emacs development forever.

> By contrast, using external implementations of technologies which are
> important to IDEs has a much higher chance of finding Free Software
> implementations that we can use, even if some of them become defunct.

My POV was shaped by something similar, except outside Emacs.  How many
people today still look to the PHIGS (and its Extension to X) for
three-dimensional graphics?  Or OpenGL 1.4?

Or what about Display PostScript, XIE, trapezoid rastering in the X
rendering extension, and quite soon Cairo?

Or what about DRI1 and XFree86-DRI for direct rendering?

Those were important implementations of technologies that were and are
directly or indirectly relevant for every GUI program in existence, and
seemed firmly entrenched when they were first created.  Yet now most of
them only exist in the memory of a select few people.

That is why it is normally desirable to implement something yourself (if
possible, unfortunately not in the case of PEX or GL 1.4), so even if
support fades and and development stalls, it can be left for 10 or 20
years and still work as satisfactorily as it used to.