Re: Suggesting that feature/tree-sitter be merged (was Re: Tree-sitter and major mode inheritance)

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Yuan Fu <casouri@gmail.com> writes:

>> On Nov 18, 2022, at 2:34 PM, Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> wrote:
>> 
>> Jostein Kjønigsen <jostein@secure.kjonigsen.net> writes:
>> 
>>> Instead of waiting for "every" major-mode to be re-implemented into a
>>> tree-sitter derivative in the feature/tree-sitter branch before we
>>> merge... How about we just accept the current "core" tree-sitter
>>> implementation as good enough, and consider merging that to git master
>>> as is.
>> 
>> I think this sounds like a good idea -- as someone who has mostly just
>> been following the discussions.  The core bindings and major modes that
>> are based on these are separate issues, with a clear dependency linked
>> them.
>> 
>> As an aside: This might also be a good opportunity to clean up some of
>> the current major mode implementations and make them more consistent.
>> The issue with custom options to enable tree-sitter for every major mode
>> has revealed an inherent duplication of features.  There are other
>> inconsistencies, especially regarding bindings for equivalent operations
>> (e.g. in interpreted language with a repl, how to load function into the
>> current session: Lisp, Prolog, Python all differ in minor details).
>
> I’ve though of this too, other things are indent level, and
> documentation. I wrote ghelp[1] to get a uniform interface for getting
> documentation in different major modes (because I don’t have the heart
> to understand and modify help.el). A builtin, unified documentation
> system would be nice, like eldoc. But eldoc is for at-point short and
> quick signature/doc more than for full-fledged documentation like
> help.el.

I suppose you forgot the link: https://github.com/casouri/ghelp.
Perhaps it could be added to ELPA, and one day to the core?

>> I can imagine a more specialised `define-generic-mode' could be of use
>> here, along with more "abstract" major modes for various types of
>> programming languages (using `prog-mode' as a base to add
>> `compiled-prog-mode' that has generic commands for building program,
>> `interpreted-prog-mode' that has generic commands for REPL
>> communication, ...), where the tree-sitter configuration would be one of
>> the attributes these modes would specify.
>
> Sounds nice. Though what do you mean by “one of the attributes”?

If we think of this as a declarative block, something like

   (define-prog-mode foo
    :type 'compiled
    :syntax (tree-sitter-syntax 'foo)
    :doc-func #'foo-get-docs
    ...)

would have a list of attributes (what kind of a programming language,
how to indent, how to fetch documentation, ...), one of which would be
how syntax and fontification is calculated.

>>> How about it? Are there any good arguments for NOT merging
>>> feature/tree-sitter at this point? :)
>> 
>> The current branch has major modes, should these be deleted before
>> merging?
>
> I think they can stay, we’ll work on them and improve them before branch is cut.

Ok, sounds good.

> Yuan