Re: Tree-sitter maturity

[Daniel Colascione <dancol@dancol.org>]

On December 28, 2024 11:19:45 PM EST, Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> wrote:
>[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
>[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
>[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>  > Oh, and another point I have been reminded of while writing this: The
>  > recent addition of more and more -ts-modes without "regular" -modes has
>  > been slightly concerning.  While I understand that re-implementing a
>  > "lua-mode" or "php-mode" from scratch is not an effort one wants to
>  > impose on anymore,
>
>This is not clean, and might be a real problem.  What should happen
>when someone who does not use tree-sitter visits a Lua file or a PHP
>file?  What happens in those cases now?
>
>In general, Emacs should not have a FOO-ts-mode without a correspnding
>FOO-mode.  Otherwise users will get surprised.  I'm not talking about
>_how_ they work, just that the commands should exist.

Enforcing this policy will just mean that Emacs doesn't support *at all* some languages out of the box and will put even more wind in the sails of soft forks like Doom. Tree sitter language descriptions are free software. There's no reason not to rely on them.

>
>It might be simple to modify lua-ts-mode so that it can be directed to
>disable tree-sitter, perhaps by a global variable -- and then define
>lua-mode to call lua-ts-mode after specifying that.
>


But the mode wouldn't do anything then.