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

[Po Lu]

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:

> Only as long as you use Latin scripts.

Or CJK ones, which work perfectly fine without HarfBuzz text shaping.
I have no experience with others.

> And even there, we want to support typographic ligatures and other
> features of modern fonts.

Typographic ligatures and modern fonts are also orthogonal to editing
code, which can be done reasonably on 8x13 or 9x15.

> Emacs is not just a text editor.  Networking is nowadays an integral
> part of any development environment.  E.g., package.el would be
> impossible without TLS connections.

But why would package.el and similar features be an integral part of any
development environment?

Remove networking support and TLS from Emacs, and people will still use
it.  Then, delete (or slowly waste away) CC Mode, and almost all of our
users will disappear.

> Because we have past experience to indicate that.  Look at Semantic,
> look at CC Mode, etc.  My conclusion from that is clear, and it's
> non-negotiable, not as long as I'm doing this job.

The difference between Semantic and tree-sitter is that Semantic is
comparatively slow, and written in Emacs Lisp, while the latter is
written in C, a much faster language with multiple higher quality
implementations.  CC Mode barely qualifies as "language parsing
technology."

Not to mention that the scope of CC Mode is really much wider than that
of tree-sitter.  i.e. tree-sitter does not provide style guessing
functionality.

> Really, how many more examples of this do we need to understand what
> is and what isn't future-proof for Emacs??  How blind can we be if,
> based on long and rich past experience such as what we have, we don't
> realize that developing key technologies in-house is a dead end for
> us?  Are we really _that_ blind??

What is actually demonstrated is that Emacs Lisp and the existing C
primitives are unsuitable for implementing language parsing technology.

> Sorry, I cannot agree with such a terrible waste of our scarce
> resources.

Too bad.