I see, so in your opinion having a central engine won't be a bad
architecture design for Emacs despite major modes having their own engine.

I wonder: is possible for any other package to "take the wheel" from major
modes when it comes to indentation or a better approach would be offering
facilities for package authors and maintainers to outsource their
indentation to this central tree-sitter-based indentation engine?

I'm trying to picture how this would look like.

El lun., 30 de mar. de 2020 a la(s) 08:11, Stefan Monnier (
monnier@iro.umontreal.ca) escribió:

> > First off, in the issue tracker we have a ticket open for making this
> > project available on GNU ELPA, Ubolonton seems willing to make that
> > a reality
>
> That would be neat.
>
> > but this package has some special requirements that would make
> > impossible to submit it to GNU ELPA or MELPA, for instance, we need to
> > ship with grammars for some languages that require compiling and AFAIK
> > there is no way to build external dependencies in *ELPA.[1]
>
> Indeed, the GNU ELPA infrastructure is too weak to support such a thing
> right now, but that's a problem we need to fix anyway, so it just means
> we should work on it.
>
> > Finally, I'm planning to tackle indentation for my next pull request.
> > It come as a surprise that Emacs has no "central" indentation engine
> > but that instead each major mode ships with its own indentation
> > engine.
>
> It's not so surprising if you think about it: indentation requires
> parsing, so "a central indentation engine" requires something like
> tree-sitter ;-)
>
> SMIE is the closest there is so far (contrary to tree-sitter it uses
> a very simple parsing strategy, which is just barely sufficient for
> "typical" indentation cases).
>
> CC-mode has another engine, which is used for several languages.
>
> And finally, there's `wisi` on GNU ELPA, it aims to be very generic and
> pretty flexible, but AFAIK it's only used by `ada-mode` so far.
>
>
>         Stefan
>
>