Subject: bug#70438: Emacs error 6 abort when starting rust-ts-mode

From: Eli Zaretskii <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 22 Apr 2024 08:54:14 +0300

> From: Yuan Fu <[email-masked]>
> Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2024 16:57:46 -0700
> Cc: Stefan Heitmann <[email-masked]>,
>  [email-masked]
> 
> > But maybe I don't have a clear idea of what exactly was the
> > incompatible change.  Can you describe it here?  Is it the signature
> > of one or more tree-sitter functions, or is it something else?
> 
> From what I understand, they changed a struct in the public interface [1]. So now the ABI changed. But they didn’t change the ABI version, and Arch and Gentoo swiftly replaced the old libtree-sitter.so with the new libtree-sitter.so. Then the old Emacs loaded the new libtree-sitter.so (which has a new ABI) and crashed.
> 
> Our code is still perfectly compatible with the new tree-sitter code; the changed field in that struct doesn’t affect us. The incompatibility is at the binary level.

And that struct is declared on the tree-sitter include file?  If so,
the only thing we can do is reject the bad version of tree-sitter at
configure time, I think.  This assumes that when they change the ABI
version, they will also bump the version of the library, so the test
for the bad version will only discover the ones that have an
incompatible ABI.

Can you add such a test to configure.ac?

(We could theoretically also fail the compilation, using the #error
directive, but AFAICT the tree-sitter header files don't declare any
version-related symbols, so we cannot check the library version at
compile time.)