A thing that has always frustrated me about github/bitbucket, as a language designer, is that you can't teach the forge to syntax highlight files in your own custom formats.
Now the existence of Codeberg/git.gay means potentially I could create a PR to forgejo to add this feature and it would get added to the forges I actually use. Perhaps at some point I will do this.
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 last I checked it was https://github.com/alecthomas/chroma ; I remember sending a patch to support Fennel and it was handled pretty promptly
@technomancy @mcc Treesitter is the biggest engineering and design trash fire that I have seen in a long time.
If I had to give people advice on how to tackle the problem of grammars and editor support, I'd point them to TreeSitter and tell them to *not* do that.
@technomancy @mcc It's as if they looked at the existing problems and requirements, and then tried coming up with the dumbest "solutions" just for shits and giggles.
Even if I tried, I wouldn't be able to come up with the sheer density of painfully wrong decisions they made.
It's all "I'd love to understand the state of their mind that led them to believing that shit to be a valid design/engineering option" the way down.
@mcc @technomancy No, I don't think good formats exist right now:
There is a rather empty niche between these simplistic, easy-to-build regex grammars and fully-featured IDE plugins.
TextMate2 grammars (and by extension Chroma grammars ... any basic syntax highlighting has likely TM2 grammars as a common ancestor) are "good" largely because of the little effort you need to spend to get things working.
@mcc @technomancy This was enough to get pretty nice syntax highlighting in IntelliJ (and other editors):
The even more bare-bone Chroma grammar that's used on Codeberg looks like this:
https://github.com/alecthomas/chroma/blob/master/lexers/embedded/core.xml
If I wanted anything fancier, I would likely not invest further time into these grammars, but start implementing a language server or an IDE plugin.
mcc
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