Re: Tree-sitter integration on feature/tree-sitter (severe performance issues together with linum-mode)

[Clément Pit-Claudel]

On 8/20/22 07:14, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> FWIW, I think specifying the highlighting rules with something akin to:
>
>      (defvar <foo> '<rules>)
>
> is a mistake.  It should go through some kind of macro, such as (maybe):
>
>      (defvar <foo> (tree-sitter-rules <rules>))
>
> which can thus do any preprocessing we may want, such as pre-compiling
> queries.  It also helps evolve the syntax since we can more easily warn
> about obsolete uses, etc...
>
> I've had a "rewrite font-lock.el so the rules go through a macro" in my
> todo list for ages.

We do things this way in Flycheck, but we've been bitten a few times by the way 
this pattern interacts with `with-eval-after-load`, so I would be careful about 
adopting this pattern in tree-sitter (unless we expect it to be preloaded).

In fact, I think your suggestion back then was to *not* use a macro?  I can't 
find the exact thread, but this is close enough: 
https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-devel/2018-02/msg00820.html :)