Re: Tree-sitter maturity

[Daniel Colascione]

On December 29, 2024 2:44:19 AM EST, Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote:
>> Date: Sat, 28 Dec 2024 23:23:55 -0500
>> From: Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>
>> CC: emacs-devel@gnu.org, manphiz@gmail.com
>> 
>> >In general, Emacs should not have a FOO-ts-mode without a correspnding
>> >FOO-mode.  Otherwise users will get surprised.  I'm not talking about
>> >_how_ they work, just that the commands should exist.
>> 
>> Enforcing this policy will just mean that Emacs doesn't support *at all* 
>> some languages out of the box and will put even more wind in the sails of 
>> soft forks like Doom. Tree sitter language descriptions are free software. 
>> There's no reason not to rely on them.
>
>We started with this concept of adding tree-sitter based modes to
>auto-mode-alist by default, but found that people who don't have the
>grammar installed didn't appreciate seeing the warnings about the
>missing grammars.  So Emacs 29 made these modes optional, activated
>only by an explicit user action.  Emacs 30 still does that.
>
>We are currently discussing how to improve this (see the thread Re:
>Turning on/off tree-sitter modes, which seems to have stalled lately).
>But until the grammar libraries are ubiquitous, and we can rely on
>them being present on most systems, I think we will still need some
>user say-so before enabling tree-sitter based modes.

Wouldn't vendoring the grammars, and maybe even tree sitter itself, silence the 
complaints about the warnings? Tree sitter is pure algorithmic code. It doesn't 
have any particular platform dependencies. Why not simplify the whole system 
and make it a mandatory (and optionally bundled) dependency so that the show 
cognitive load of having to consider non-TS environments is just deleted?