Re: Tree-sitter maturity (was: My resignation from Emacs development)

[Stefan Kangas <stefankangas@gmail.com>]

Peter Oliver <p.d.oliver@mavit.org.uk> writes:

> On Wed, 20 Nov 2024, Stefan Kangas wrote:
>
>> From my point of view, we are still in early days when it comes to
>> the new tree-sitter modes.  For starters, we do not recommend them by
>> default, and some language modes are also not yet ready for
>> prime-time.  I'm not even sure that a majority of distros ship the
>> feature in a useful form yet, but I didn't really check.
>
> It depends on what you mean by useful.  In Fedora, for example, Emacs
> is built with Tree-sitter, but each user has to (ask Emacs to)
> download and compile each parser as they go along.

Thanks.  I meant that one cannot yet use them after simply installing
the "emacs" package, without taking additional steps.

> If any Fedora packagers read this and would like to help with
> packaging the parsers used by Emacs, that would be welcome.  The
> tracking bug is https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2258924

Thanks for working on this.  Packaging Tree-sitter seems somewhat
challenging, but getting it done is essential if we want to see more
widespread use of Tree-sitter in our user base.

> It’s also worth noting that Tree-sitter itself is somewhat immature;
> the developers say that until it reaches version 1.0, we should be
> wary of potentially unannounced incompatible changes (although they
> are trying harder to avoid this, over time).