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by foobarbaz33 837 days ago
Steve Yegge also made js2-mode. Which is basically treesitter for javascript.

He was ahead of his time on dev tooling. I'm still using js2-mode to this day.

1 comments

js2-mode was the coolest major mode for Emacs back in the day. The js2 parser is primitive, non-incremental and language-specific.

semantic-mode almost, a-a-a-lmost did something similar (mostly based on LR incremental parsing) but was Emacs-only and never gained enough traction.

Tree-sitter is decades ahead of both. It's hard to compare js2 to a modern GLR incremental parser generator of Tree-sitter. I am not even talking about the size of the community building grammars useful in all the editors out there.