Re: cc-mode fontification feels random

[Theodor Thornhill]

>> As long as I can remember, cc-mode fontification has felt totally 
>> random, with actual faces depending on happenstance of previously-parsed 
>> types, luck of the draw in jit-lock chunking, and so on. Is there any 
>> *general* way that we can make fontification more robust and consistent?

Yes, tree-sitter.  Ubolonton has made a tremendous package implementing
this for emacs.  It is used in csharp-mode already, with success.  At
least for the fontification.  There are still some kinks to work out in
the indentation part of the mode.

In C#-mode we use tree sitter for:

- Fontification
- Indentation

There is also a normal CC mode version, which is enabled by default.  So
you need to install the third party packages as well as enabling
csharp-tree-sitter-mode.  You can try it out and see if it has some
benefits.  Performance wise the tree-sitter mode is leagues above the CC
mode one.  Also one benefit is that it is extremely easy to define
these grammars.

> See also Eglot and LSP.

LSP-mode supports the semantic fontification from lsp servers, which
usually uses tree-sitter.  Examples for this is Rust, F# and others.
Eglot does not yet support this, though I believe there is an issue
somewhere for it.

>
> Patches more than welcome, I think having this (whether tree-sitter or
> some other similar technology) in core is long overdue.

Pinging @Ubolonton and Joao, as they probably know way more than
me about this.

--
Theodor Thornhill