I'm considering using emacs as a platform for C++ development. One thing that seems to lag behind on emacs at the moment is that all of the syntax highlighting for C++ is (as far as I can tell) regex based. This severely limits the accuracy and discrimination that the syntax highlighter can achieve. There are now some packages for emacs that use a clang based backends to get actual AST information. Perhaps it would be possible to write some kind of hooks or template for major modes that would make it easier for package authors to change how syntax highlighting is performed in major modes?