Re: Ada-mode to be abandoned?

[Fernando Oleo Blanco <irvise_ml@irvise.xyz>]

Hi Philip and the larger Emacs community,

thank you for bringing this topic up. Stephen also posted this message 
to Ada-Lang.io [1], which have become sort of a home for the Adaists. 
Sadly nobody there seemed to be willing to take over maintainership. 
Nonetheless, I would like to say that there are still a few of us that 
do use this mode and we are glad that we have it :)

If I am allowed to express my personal opinion here...

ada-mode, as it currently stands, requires compiling some Ada code in 
order for it to work. It comes with some helper scripts for that task. 
However, the experience to get it working is not as nice as with other 
packages due to the compilation step. One cannot simply install it and 
just M-x ada-mode... This nuisance is compounded by the fact that 
GNAT/GCC-Ada tends to break old code (for the better, as it becomes even 
more reliable) and ada-mode sometimes requires modern compilers to work. 
It also has some external dependencies that are installed with the 
installer script, which, imho, is not that nice...

I do not want the paragraph above to be understood as a criticism to the 
current state of things. We have what we have and that is great, but I 
want to point out major improvement points as I see them.

I personally would prefer to see a tree-sitter/pure-elisp 
implementation, which could make the maintenance burden smaller and 
improve the user experience as Stephen points out in his list. Then, as 
he also says, we have an LSP nowdays, which is nice; but a dedicated 
ada-mode is still very important.

If anybody needs help testing ada-mode, I am willing to do so as I have 
done a couple of times.

Best regards,
Fernando Oleo Blanco

[1] https://forum.ada-lang.io/t/gnu-emacs-ada-mode-passing-the-torch/518

P.S: I am not volunteering as my time and knowledge of the subject are 
very limited...

On 1/7/24 13:34, Philip Kaludercic wrote:
> 
> I recently came across this message on the ada-mode-users' mailing list:
> 
>    https://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/ada-mode-users/2023-11/msg00000.html
> 
> Stephen (the maintainer, in the CC's) indicates that he would like to
> retire from maintenance, which might mean that the package could become
> abandon-ware.
> 
> One note he makes is that the current implementation could be
> simplified, by just using tree-sitter, instead of the approach that
> makes use of a custom parser:
> 
> --8<---------------cut here---------------start------------->8---
> 2) Drop the wisitoken parser generator and runtime, use tree-sitter
>     instead. This requires writing a wrapper for tree-sitter to match
>     the wisitoken syntax-tree API; then the current wisi indentation
>     code can be used.
> 
>     This maintains all of the ada-mode features, while reducing the
>     maintenance burden significantly.
> 
>     I believe the tree-sitter error correction is less powerful than
>     wisitoken, but it would be interesting to see if that matters in
>     practice.
> --8<---------------cut here---------------end--------------->8---
> 
> What I am wondering, is if this simplification were to take place, if it
> would be possible to add ada-mode (or ada-ts-mode in that case) back to
> the core?  I would be glad to help out, since I've been interested in
> working with Ada for a while but never got it to work, I have just been
> struggling with understanding how `treesit-font-lock-rules' is supposed
> to be used, so some help would be appreciated.
> 
> --
> Philip Kaludercic
>