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

[Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>]

> From: Po Lu <luangruo@yahoo.com>
> Cc: casouri@gmail.com,  theo@thornhill.no,  acm@muc.de,
>   emacs-devel@gnu.org,  jostein@kjonigsen.net
> Date: Tue, 11 Oct 2022 15:50:41 +0800
> 
> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
> 
> > Like rendering complex scripts, for example: Emacs supports
> > Arabic, but without HarfBuzz display of Arabic is illegible to Arabic
> > and Farsi speakers.  Does that strike you as a problem?  If not, why
> > not?
> 
> English is the lingua franca of computer programmers.

Yes, but Emacs is not only for editing computer programs.  It is also
for editing human-readable text, email exchange, writing program
documentation, and other areas where support for various scripts and
languages is important.  Otherwise, why would we invest such a
significant effort into providing and developing those features?  Why
did Emacs so painstakingly go from unibyte text representation to
multibyte in version 20?

> Arabic and Farsi are significantly more niche languages that are
> generally not used in computer code at all

Actually, they are: in comments and strings.

Anyway, this line of reasoning is a non-starter.  You are, in effect,
denying the whole chunk of Emacs history and development since the
late 90s.

> Besides, HarfBuzz is arguably a system library.  Modern GNU/Linux
> systems cannot provide text display without it at all.

The same will arguably happen with tree-sitter, once Emacs starts
using it seriously.

> > GnuTLS, at least, is no longer optional: most servers will reject
> > clear-text connections.  TLS is nowadays a basic requirement, AFAIU.
> >
> > So we already depend on external libraries for reasonable
> > functioning.  There's nothing new here.
> 
> Network access is not required for "reasonable functioning"

Of course, it is.

> we even have builds that do not support it at all.

We will also support a build without tree-sitter.  It will lack
important features, exactly like builds without the other optional
libraries lack important features.  But it will allow one to edit
program source files.