Re: Using incremental parsing in Emacs

[Eli Zaretskii]

> Cc: "address@hidden" <address@hidden>
> From: Dmitry Gutov <address@hidden>
> Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2020 00:56:38 +0300
> 
> (**) Which means that if we try to use Tree-Sitter as-is, our current 
> practice of defining the language grammar in Lisp would go our of the 
> window. https://github.com/ubolonton/emacs-tree-sitter demonstrates this 
> as well: language grammars have to be compiled into a shared library (or 
> libraries). We would have lots of grammars supplied by the third party, 
> which is kind of good, but we would lose the ease of experimenting with 
> them that we have now, or being able to write support for a new 
> up-and-coming language very quickly. Which a certain fraction of our 
> users enjoys, AFAIK.

If we provide infrastructure for using the likes of Tree-Sitter in
core, how long do you think it will take until someone rewrites their
JS generator of parse tables in Lisp?  And we already have machinery
in place for loading external shared objects; it can be extended if
necessary to handle loading parse tables.

Bottom line: this aspect doesn't sound like a problem to me in the
long run.  I was rather surprised that they didn't have ELisp parse
tables out of the box.

> My personal takeaway is that we could really benefit from a lispier 
> version of this technology, and Someone(tm) should start working on that.

Agreed.