Re: c-ts-mode

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Petteri Hintsanen <petterih@iki.fi>
> Cc: Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>,  theo@thornhill.no,  casouri@gmail.com,
>   spacibba@aol.com,  emacs-devel@gnu.org
> Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2023 22:58:22 +0300
> 
> João Távora <joaotavora@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > Maybe in the past CC Mode's styles were very useful, but I don't
> > think they attract the same interest today because there are these
> > external tools.  For the same reason, I don't predict ts
> > indentation styles to become widely used.
> 
> I have to disagree with this.  Built-in styles are useful, and for me
> they have been, in all major modes I've used (not just CC mode), close
> enough for almost all use cases over the years.  I use external tools
> like clang-format only to satisfy some CI systems that (IMO stupidly)
> enforce certain formatting.
> 
> In general I'd find it a bit disconcerting if the tendency is to move
> towards external stuff for basics like syntax highlighting and code
> formatting.

There's no such "move", not in Emacs anyway.  We will continue
supporting our built-in rules for the observable future.  This
discussion is about _allowing_ users who do want it to have Emacs obey
indentation rules specified on external files of de-facto standard
structure and format.  When this is implemented, it should be an
optional feature that users activate only if they want/need it.

> I personally don't like the idea of installing a couple of
> libraries plus their emacs glue libs, source code formatters along with
> their dependencies, and huge language servers [*], to get first class
> "editing experience" -- Emacs is supposedly a text editor, after all.
> Especially given that I've got to install and use Emacs on resource
> limited machines and ones where I do not have admin rights, so I cannot
> install those externals just like that.

You are assuming something about the implementation that still doesn't
exist.  If you mean LSP, then I agree that it should ideally not be
the prerequisite to having this feature, and I think at least for most
of that functionality we could simply convert the external rules into
our internal variables and data structures used by indentation
functions.

> It is great that Emacs is able to leverage the power of third party libs
> and tools, but I think this should not come at the expense of built in
> functionality.  Of course the rant above was a rhetoric exaggeration,
> but still it is perhaps something to keep in mind when designing for the
> future.

We always keep that in mind.