Subject: Re: bug#26217: bug#2910: 23.0.60; Shell-script coloring bug

From: Dmitry Gutov <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 14 Oct 2023 19:43:00 +0300

On 13/10/2023 19:06, Stefan Monnier via Bug reports for GNU Emacs, the 
Swiss army knife of text editors wrote:
>> I don't know what's the decision (if there is one) about situations like
>> these.  If the bugs in lang-mode are fixed by lang-ts-mode, will these
>> bug reports be treated as: wontfix? fixed? open in case someone wants to
>> spend time in lang-mode?
> 
> AFAIK we don't consider the `foo-ts-mode` to obsolete the other modes.
> Maybe we will, but we don't yet.  IMO I think we'd first need to have
> a good long-term strategy about what we'll do when tree-sitter becomes
> unmaintained/obsolete.  IOW I think we need to develop our own layer of
> abstraction above tree-sitter so that we can accommodate other
> parser backends.
> 
> FWIW, it's not clear at all what such a layer would look like, so we're
> pretty far from it.  I'd welcome people start thinking about it, maybe
> by looking at existing alternatives like our own `wisi` (in GNU ELPA),
> SMIE, maybe LSP (assuming there are servers out there which can provide
> that kind of functionality), etc...

I don't know how feasible that would be, given that the ts major modes 
we write have to reference fairly low level concerns (such as node 
names, different across all grammars).

Maybe porting Lezer (https://lezer.codemirror.net/) could become a 
replacement in such a scenario, but then we're back to maintaining our 
own grammars again, and with lower performance by an order of a magnitude.