Difficulty building tree-sitter grammars [was: Help sought from C++ expert: ....]

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hello, Eli.

On Thu, Jan 19, 2023 at 16:59:59 +0200, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > Date: Thu, 19 Jan 2023 14:53:22 +0000
> > From: Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>

> > Just as a matter of interest, in c++-ts-mode a treesit-query-error gets
> > thrown.

> I don't see any such error.  Maybe this is again your outdated grammar
> library?

Heh!  Maybe you're right.  So time to get around to installing one from
github.  So I look at the Emacs-29 NEWS for instructions on how to do
this.  These instructions are glib and insufficiently helpful.

(i) The smallest problem is actually downloading the source of, e.g.,
tree-sitter-cpp.  github doesn't make it obvious how to download stuff,
and it took me over 10 minutes to find the GUI thing to activate the
download.  Then this download was a file.zip.  The instructions don't
mention that, on GNU, a package called zip is required to unzip this.

(ii) The instructions glibly say "To compile such a library, compile the
files "scanner.c" and "parser.c" (sometimes named "scanner.cc" and
"parser.cc") in the "src" subdirectory of the library's source tree
using the C or C++ compiler,...".  A Python hacker may well not even
know that the C/C++ compiler is called "gcc", far less that the
necessary command line option -c is needed to compile the two source
files.  Personally, this bit didn't present me any great difficulty.

(iii) The instructions continue with "..., then link these two files
into a shared library named "libtree-sitter-LANG.so, ...".  How,
exactly?  I've guessed that I can also do this with gcc, and need the
option -o libtree-sitter-cpp.so, but I also need some flags meaning
"link" and "build a .so" and some standard run-time library besides the
two object files.  I still haven't worked out what these are.  The
Python hacker pictured above will be totally lost here.

(iv) Then we have precise instructions on where to put the newly built
..so file.  This is good!

This process has so far taken me over an hour, which is too long for
something which should be purely routine.  It is likely to take a
typical Emacs user even longer.

I suggest that these instructions in NEWS should be enhanced with (i)
Tips on downloading stuff from github; (ii) A sample command line for
compiling the C/C++ source files; (iii) A sample command line for
linking these to the needed .so file.  Possibly two or three versions of
these would be needed for the different environments Emacs runs in.

And now, on with the tedious drudgery of working out how to link
tree-sitter-cpp.so using gcc.  :-(

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).