Re: cc-mode fontification feels random

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hello, Daniel.

On Thu, Jun 03, 2021 at 20:16:53 -0700, Daniel Colascione wrote:
> As long as I can remember, cc-mode fontification has felt totally 
> random, .....

Hmmm.  It is anything but totally random.

> ..... with actual faces depending on happenstance of previously-parsed
> types, .....

Whether a type is recognised as such depends on that, yes.  It's hard to
think of a better way without having the resources of a compiler,
particularly for ill-behaved languages like C++.

> ..... luck of the draw in jit-lock chunking, .....

That should be a thing of the past, much effort having been put into
eradicating such errors.  That is one of the main reasons for the
relative slowness of CC Mode, as compared with, say, Emacs Lisp Mode.

> ..... and so on.

And so on???

> Is there any *general* way that we can make fontification more robust
> and consistent?

Like other people have said on the thread, rewriting CC Mode to use an
LSP parser.

Less drastically, it would be possible to fix the specific bug you
allude to, by the user making a list of types and configuring CC Mode
with them, rather than attempting to recognise such types.  This feels
as though it would be tedious to use, though.

> For years and years now, I've been thinking we just need more 
> deterministic parser-and-based mode support, and I still think that, but 
> on a realistic level, that doesn't seem to be coming any time soon.

What does "parser-and-based" mean?

> In the meantime, is there any general approach we might be able to use 
> to get stuff like the attached to stop happening?

Probably none that we'd like.  Fontifying types only at their point of
declaration would be one, but I don't think people would want that.  My
impression is that the approach taken by CC Mode, like that of most
language modes in Emacs, has pretty much reached the limits of what's
possible, and it is unreasonable to expect perfect fontification (and
indentation) from languages like C++ in all cases.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).