tree-sitter-elisp VS tree-sitter-markdown

Here is the tree-sitter grammar of Elisp:

https://github.com/Wilfred/tree-sitter-elisp/blob/main/gramm... (approx. 200 lines)

and here is the grammar of JavaScript:

https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-javascript/blob/m... (approx. 1200 lines)

JavaScript evolved into a language of similar complexity as Perl 5 (the corresponding tree sitter syntax table counts almost 2000 lines, currently).

> I like the multiprocess approach with standard protocols, despite its complexities, because it lets different editors share smarts.

Yes, the benefit LSP brings is putting editors/IDEs on equal footing with respect to a specific language. Also the multiplicative effect when the author of a new language provides a language server so nobody needs to switch their IDEs to try it out.

However, seeing how „straight forward“ a tree-sitter specific language grammar looks in practice (1) makes we wonder if by providing a TS grammar for a language would realize (almost) the same benefit. Based on such a grammar and TS’ selector engine figuring out a syntax highlighting scheme, code folder, a docstring or symbol scanner might not be such a huge endeavor any more as you described for ENSIME.

So, yeah, in the end LSP might be dead end at some point, especially because TS promises to be very fast and avoids any IPC. Performance seems to be the biggest problem of LSP clients in Emacs and probably other editors as well.

(1) https://github.com/Wilfred/tree-sitter-elisp/blob/main/gramm... — of course, the example being ELISP makes it look easier than said, if you compare it with the grammar of Perl5 that’s not yet finished unsurprisingly.

The markdown treesitter grammar accepts environment variables when building to tweak it's behavior. How can I pass these? Currently I am using

given the existence of tree sitter grammar for markdown, I think it’d be fairly easy to implement the linter on top of it.

The original repo wasn't working since the move from ikatyang/tree-sitter-markdown to the new markdown parser by /u/deinemade/ MDeiml/tree-sitter-markdown so I kept maintaining it as a fork with the absolute basics just so I could generate the vimdoc for fzf-lua.

The new parser https://github.com/MDeiml/tree-sitter-markdown is more stable. And should be installed by default, if not just run :TSInstall markdown

Looks like this scanner uses more of the parser generator features of tree-sitter: grammar.json is almost 11k lines of "definitely not easy to maintain (IMHO)" json. Where as ikatyang's version is a hand written parser. tree-sitter is not great for languages that are not deterministic. The benefits for ikatyang is that it is probably easier to maintain, the drawbacks are it can definitely crash neovim (sadly). For these types of syntax, a parser definitely needs to support look ahead and look behind, which tree-sitter does not support. This is just my not-so-computer-science-y theory.

There have been big problems with treesitter Markdown, but the good news is that a brand new version is being worked on and looks like it is going to be awesome! https://github.com/MDeiml/tree-sitter-markdown