Oh. it's… oh.

It's… custom Go code… on a per-language basis. they use something called Chroma and the way Chroma works is it wrote custom lexers in Go for each language they want to support. Um. Hm.

This is actually the one single approach they could have attempted which prevents custom pluggable highlighters on a per-repo basis.

https://hey.hagelb.org/@technomancy/statuses/01KNQJ9H3R64BEHE1QWNBXZKVW

@mcc the main thing is that grammars are opaque blobs of executable code, which sucks! technically you can often compile them from a declarative data source but afaict you can't do this without npm

a well-designed format would make the unit of distribution a purely declarative data format but instead we ended up with this situation where you could install a grammar that segfaults your editor or steals your SSH keys; gross!

@technomancy in treesitter, they are?

yikes

@mcc some editors have configuration flows where it's just like "ok imma just curl a tree-sitter grammar .so file from gods know where and load it directly into the process; hope everything's fine and nothing bad happens!"

it's like the flow you'd come up with if you were a supply-chain attacker trying to maximize attack surface

@c0dec0dec0de @technomancy *rubbing eyes* which problem does this fix, exactly? is the idea that instead of pulling in .SO's you pull in .WASMs and that's safer?

Unfortunately I don't think that's adequate for codeberg's purposes as they need to worry not only about VM breaks but also about DOS attacks. Nothing prevents wasm from simply being very slow.