Emacs mode: using tree-sitter

[Emmanuel Briot <briot.emmanuel@gmail.com>]

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