Thank you all for your posts - keep them coming! Here’s a follow up on some of the pain points you’ve described.
Syntax highlighting
To address this in a sustainable way, we are going to experiment with semantic highlighting. Semantic highlighting means doing this: file contents -> parse to ReScript AST -> produce a set of tokens for highlighting from the AST
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While this will mean a larger up front cost for setting up the infra needed etc, we believe this is the best way forward. We’re hoping it’ll make tweaking the highlighting easy and correct, as it’ll be driven by the real parser and actual AST (which of course is 100% accurate), rather than attempting to reproduce parts of the parser via regexp etc.
Also, we’d be very happy if there’s community members who’d be interested in contributing a bit more in depth to this. We’re going to start by setting up the needed infrastructure and so on, but after that there’s likely going to be quite a lot of work in doing the actual highlighting (matching the various AST nodes and producing semantic tokens from them where appropriate). Most of the work is going to be in OCaml (in the analysis bin of the VSCode extension repo). Please reach out if you’re interested in contributing to this!
Feedback without saving
We hear you, and it would be wonderful to have. Unfortunately, this is an area full of complexity and trade offs. There’s still no decision if this is something that’ll be pursued at all, but if it were, it’d likely require potentially invasive changes to the compiler.
A short follow up, thank you all again for posting your pains and thoughts!