Post Syndicated from original https://lwn.net/Articles/916201/

Lucien Cartier-Tilet looks
forward to the upcoming Emacs 29 release.

In case you didn’t know, Emacs’ current syntax highlighting is
currently based on a system of regexes. Although it is not the
worst thing to use, it’s not the best either, and it can become
quite slow on larger files.

TreeSitter parses programming languages based into a concrete
syntax tree. From there, not only can syntax highlighting can be
done at high speed, but a much deeper analysis of the code is
possible and actions such sa syntax manipulation can also be
achieved since the syntax tree itself is available as an object
which can be manipulated!