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

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>
> Cc: Theodor Thornhill <theo@thornhill.no>,  Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,
>   Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>,  emacs-devel <emacs-devel@gnu.org>,
>   jostein@kjonigsen.net
> Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2022 13:47:27 +0800
> 
> IMNHSO a text editor should be able to edit languages it supports
> out-of-the-box, with only system libraries and what is in
> emacs-28.2.tar.gz.

That is about to happen, please read the other messages in this
thread.  But "able to edit languages" and "able to provide a
reasonably modern support for those languages" aren't necessarily the
same.  Like rendering complex scripts, for example: Emacs supports
Arabic, but without HarfBuzz display of Arabic is illegible to Arabic
and Farsi speakers.  Does that strike you as a problem?  If not, why
not?

> There is no precedent for requiring a third party library that users
> have to build themselves to edit text comfortably.

There is, actually, see above.

> Optional dependencies such as librsvg, libxml and gnutls are not
> precedent here - all three are widely available, and relate to features
> that are orthogonal to text editing.

GnuTLS, at least, is no longer optional: most servers will reject
clear-text connections.  TLS is nowadays a basic requirement, AFAIU.

So we already depend on external libraries for reasonable
functioning.  There's nothing new here.