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

[Po Lu]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> 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?

English is the lingua franca of computer programmers.  Thus, if Emacs
supports English, then it will immediately work for the vast majority of
people who have reason to use it.  Arabic and Farsi are significantly
more niche languages that are generally not used in computer code at
all, so it is okay to ask people who want to program in those languages
to install some other library.

Besides, HarfBuzz is arguably a system library.  Modern GNU/Linux
systems cannot provide text display without it at all.

> 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.

Network access is not required for "reasonable functioning" - we even
have builds that do not support it at all.