I was looking recently at both Emacs and vim recent updates, and noted that both those tools now provide interfaces to tree-sitter (https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/) which is a parser generator and incremental parsing library. It doesn't have
an Ada parser yet, though :-(

It might be nice, as a community, to work on such a parser though. I did not look into what that implies yet, maybe someone else has already started work on that.

The advantage might be that the Emacs ada-mode can use that instead of its home-brewed parser (which although I am sure it was fun to develop still likely requires some maintenance by Stephen, and definitely requires manually compiling some Ada code
before we can use the ada-mode).

We could also use it to improve the current vim ada-mode, which hasn't been updated in years and could do with various improvements.

Finally, maybe we could talk with the GNAT Studio team. I don't think they have looked into tree-sitter yet, but it might be useful.

I do not know whether tools like Visual Studio Code also interface with tree-sitter, but maybe that library will become the equivalent of the Language Server Protocol, and companies provide one tree-sitter parser + one language server and the IDE
automatically gains support for Ada

Emmanuel

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Emmanuel Briot <briot.emmanuel@gmail.com> writes:

I was looking recently at both Emacs and vim recent updates, and noted
that both those tools now provide interfaces to tree-sitter (https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/) which is a parser
generator and incremental parsing library. It doesn't have an Ada
parser yet, though :-(

And it won't until the parser generator gets a serious overhaul:

https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/issues/693

It might be nice, as a community, to work on such a parser though. I
did not look into what that implies yet, maybe someone else has
already started work on that.

Yes, me. There is code in wisitoken devel that converts any wisitoken
grammar to tree-sitter syntax. I find EBNF much more readable than the javascript DSL tree-sitter uses.

The advantage might be that the Emacs ada-mode can use that instead of
its home-brewed parser (which although I am sure it was fun to develop
still likely requires some maintenance by Stephen, and definitely
requires manually compiling some Ada code before we can use the
ada-mode).

Someone would have to maintain the tree-sitter parser; it's not magic.

And you'd have to compile the tree-sitter parser as well. Again, not magic.

We could also use it to improve the current vim ada-mode, which hasn't
been updated in years and could do with various improvements.

It might be easier to adapt the Emacs ada-mode code to meet the vim
plugin interface.

Or adapt Emacs ada-mode code to LSP, that would benefit many editors.

Finally, maybe we could talk with the GNAT Studio team. I don't think
they have looked into tree-sitter yet, but it might be useful.

They provide an LSP ada-language-server: https://github.com/AdaCore/ada_language_server

It is not as feature rich as the ada-mode parser.

I doubt they have the resources for anything more (unless the request
comes with money, of course).

--
-- Stephe

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