Switch from CSTParser to something else (tree-sitter or JuliaSyntax)

[gcv]

By switching to tree-sitter, built into Emacs as of version 29, all the questions Snail asks of CSTParser can be answered without leaving Elisp. This will be a significant benefit, not only by eliminating a dependency on CSTParser and its potentially unstable API, but also because Julia startup time will improve.

In general, it'll be great to ditch all Julia-side dependencies for core Snail functionality and leave them to extensions.

[MasonProtter]

By the way, JuliaSyntax.jl is now bundled inside of modern versions of Julia (since 1.9, and the new LTS is going to be v1.10), so you could also just use JuliaSyntax.jl instead of TreeSitter, but if there's other benefits to TreeSitter then I guess we should go with that.

[linwaytin]

I also feel JuliaSyntax.jl should be a better option than TreeSitter. The progress of tree-sitter-julia is slow, and I do not think it is supported officially from the Julia community.

[gcv]

At this point, I’m also leaning in the direction of JuliaSyntax. I’m a little concerned about yanking the rug out from any users who need Julia versions <1.10, but it should be okay, as long as the docs point out that older versions of Snail can be installed using straight.el or Elpaca.

[linwaytin]

Also I think JuliaSyntax can be manually installed for version < 1.10, so it should not be a big problem to use this parser.

[MasonProtter]

Yes, JuliaSyntax is compatible all the way back to julia v1.0 and is on the general registry.