Generate grammar from syntax

[kuviman]

• TextMate (for vscode)
• treesitter

[RedCMD]

here's my VSCode extension to help with authoring TextMate grammars https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=RedCMD.tmlanguage-syntax-highlighter

[kuviman]

@RedCMD The idea of this issue is to generate the TextMate grammar files from existing syntax definitions of Kast, but this extension helps writing it by hand as I understand, so I don't think it is relevant

[RedCMD]

it has diagnostics to help validate that the generated TextMate grammar is correct

could you link the Kast syntax definition files?
I could possibly help with the writing of your converter

[kuviman]

Kast has extensible syntax which means syntax definitions are not standalone files but regular Kast code. Ideally in the future we have syntax inspection APIs so one can write such a converter in Kast itself, similarly to how I see the eventual API for writing custom compilers.

Until then we could have the Kast binary have an option to convert to TextMate by interpreting source code and converting all the syntax definitions from it. Here's the current default syntax which is part of stdlib: https://github.com/kast-lang/kast/blob/main/src/syntax/default/rules.ks. This one could be processed as standalone file without full interpretation but I'm not sure it will be kept like this forever, so converter should be embedded in the language.

Probably better to create a separate library for it that would just depend on syntax, and have the api to convert Syntax.rule list to TextMate, and then use it in the binary.