Re: cc-mode fontification feels random

[Ergus <spacibba@aol.com>]

On Sat, Jun 12, 2021 at 01:25:14PM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
>>> Agreed.  Maybe a first step would be to get copyright assignments and
>>> include the tree sitter module in GNU ELPA?
>> If I read some of these mails correctly it seems like that wouldn't be
>> possible due to interest from some of the parties involved in the main
>> package.  I don't know the details on that, though.
>
>Before we start a parallel effort, we definitely should make every effort
>to get copyright assignments for the existing code.  Maybe we can't take
>the package as-is because some contributors won't accept to sign the
>paperwork, but we can probably get paperwork for a significant fraction
>of the code.
>
>That would already help reduce duplicated efforts.
>
>This is very important, not just to reduce the amount of work, but also
>to avoid alienating interested parties.
>
I agree, but it looks like Eli wants a different approach for the
calling and a part of the performance issues come from the font-lock and
Lisp hooks and translations forth and back. Something that a package
implemented with modules still do at some level.

Will you write to the authors on GH? There are only 17 contributors, so
not a crazy number of copyrights to get.

What is wondering me is that managing copyright usually is a never
ending problem. We are still waiting for use-package to get all of
them. And every time we say to gather copyrights then there is a dead
time and the topic is forgotten after a while.

The package was designed to be an external feature so it may use some
"inefficient" solutions (lisp calls from C, substring, font-lock init
functions) that could be cleaned and improvement to access internal C
code directly; that will require a deeper knowledge of the package and
emacs C code to be handled, and I don't know how available will be the
developers to do so.



>> And Eli seems unhappy with what's there.
>
>That doesn't mean we have to start over from scratch.
>
That's true. But the approach implemented with modules or internally in
emacs may be very different right?

>> As for making a little more concrete proposal for how to move forward,
>> would this be something like what we want?
>> - create/use c or rust bindings
>
>I think we'd want to link to the C API of tree-sitter.
>There's no point going through Rust at this point, AFAICT.
>
>> - create an elisp-layer for interaction with the parse tree
>> - hook fontification and indentation into that elisp-layer
>
>Sounds about right.
>
>
>        Stefan
>
>