Re: cc-mode fontification feels random

[Daniel Martín]

Jim Porter <jporterbugs@gmail.com> writes:

> Looking into this a bit more, I'm not actually 100% sure how much
> VSCode (or other LSP-aware editors) use LSP for syntax highlighting
> today. Semantic tokens are only available in the most recent
> specification of LSP (3.16)[1], so many LSP clients/servers likely
> wouldn't be using this yet. It might be helpful to see what they were
> doing prior to this; there may be some relatively non-invasive changes
> that could improve things.

VSCode uses TextMate grammars[1] for syntax highlighting.  If the
language server supports it, it adds semantic highlighting on top of it.

I think TextMate grammars have more or less the same problems our
current syntax highlighting engine has: They are regexp-based, and
difficult to write and maintain.

Two editors that I think are already using Tree-sitter for syntax
highlighting are Atom and Neovim.

[1]: https://macromates.com/manual/en/language_grammars