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

[Jostein Kjønigsen]

On 20.10.2022 03:15, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> Some people seem very optimistic about what tree-sitter will bring, yes.

I may be one of those people.

So for the record, I would like to make it absolutely clear that I think 
tree-sitter will bring improvements. Not unconditionally, but certainly 
it will help with some things.

I know from experience that it will improve greatly upon the classic 
(cc-mode based) csharp-mode. typescript-mode is also suffering when 
encountering complex grammar, which tree-sitter seems to solve adequately.

These are languages without the ambiguities of macros, and syntax can be 
parsed reliably based on single documents alone. These are perfect for 
tree-sitter.

> I think our track record should be enough to reassure users that we
> won't just throw away CC-mode if tree-sitter doesn't prove to be
> a worthy replacement *and* that it won't be thrown away any time soon
> even if tree-sitter is much better.

Tree-sitter is just code, like all other code out there. It's not going 
to magically improve everything everywhere. But that should be OK, as 
long as the use of it is constrained to areas where its parsers are 
objectively superior.

Even as one of the "tree-sitter advocates" in this thread, I don't see 
any value in shoehorning it into areas where it objectively doesn't 
provide us with anything. If cryptic, macro-ridden C is something it is 
bad at, then perhaps we shouldn't use it for that.

But let's not dissuade people who want to try it out from seeing if we 
can get better results than Emacs currently provides :)

> So, let's all take a deep breath and just wait to see how things play
> out before we make any assumption or decision.

Definitely this. We're trying out something new, to improve upon or 
support new languages we haven't been able to do perfectly so far.

In my books that's exclusively a good thing.

--
Jostein