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

[Peter Oliver <p.d.oliver@mavit.org.uk>]

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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.

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

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).

-- 
Peter Oliver