Upstream official Rust package

[Manishearth]

Currently Rust maintains a Sublime package here which handles syntax/snippets/etc. It does not handle autocompletion, though there are packages for that.

It would be nice if it was bundled by default. Opening this bug to see if there are any objections to that before opening a PR 😄

I assume it's a straightforward matter of copying the Rust package into this folder, but of course I'll test it out first.

[Manishearth]

(Also, in case this is accepted, how would upgrading work for people who have installed the Package Control Rust package and upgrade to a sublime containing the package by default? will the package be silently overridden, or will it cause issues?)

[wbond]

Package Control installs packages as a .sublime-package file into the Installed Packages/folder in Sublime Text 3. (That is, unless the package has a .no-sublime-package file in the root.)

If there is a .sublime-package file in the Installed Packages/ folder with the same name as the default packages shipped with Sublime Text, it will ignore the default package completely, and only use the one from Installed Packages/.

All of that is to say, users who have installed Rust.sublime-package from Package Control will continue to get updates that way. If we were to include Rust as a default package, it would not interfere with users who already have it installed.

[jrappen]

If (and only if) the @rust-lang group would then stop maintaining their own package and start updating this one though, you'd be overwriting a possibly newer file here with an older one there. Not implying that would happen, simply stating what could possibly happen if that were the case.

[Manishearth]

We would continue to maintain if necessary (perhaps just making it a simple copy), and when the sublime version with Rust is released, release a new version of the package control package with release notes mentioning that it's installed by default.

[wbond]

@Manishearth I am planning on converting it to the new .sublime-syntax at some point in the near future so we can get it into the default packages. Once we have it in a beta release, we can change the version on Package Control to be for ST2 only.

[Manishearth]

it as in the Rust package? sounds cool! I thought tmLanguage files were okay in default-packages, though?

[Manishearth]

oh, looks like they aren't. Thanks for offering to convert it; I have no idea how to do that 😄

(though it probably isn't too hard)

[wbond]

@Manishearth Yes, I spoke with Jon and we would both like to get Rust included in the default packages.

There is an automated script to convert it to the new syntax. At that point I'll review the current definition and look for any features (such as lookbehinds) that aren't compatible with the newer regex engine and find an alternative way to implement them. This helps improve performance – not only the file load time, but also the speed of the indexer since it tokenizes all the files it finds.

To give you a sense of the performance difference, recently I rewrote the JavaScript syntax and achieved about a 400% improvement in speed by avoiding the few regex features not available in the new engine.

The only other thing I could use from the Rust community is some files that exhibit various syntax, especially edge cases. I'll then write a test file to ensure that we don't have any regressions from future pull requests.

[Manishearth]

Ooh, nice.

some files that exhibit various syntax

https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/tree/master/src/test/run-pass contains a ton of testcase files you might want to use to check how the highlighting works.

rustfmt's tests contain more specific syntax examples.

If you'd like more examples of some specific syntax let me know, and I can enumerate how that syntax works.

cc @nrc

[wbond]

I've just added an initial version of Rust support with 58cb410.

I started with https://github.com/rust-lang/sublime-rust and did the following:

• Converted snippets to use tabs so that the user's chosen indentation is always used
• Converted Rust.tmLanguage to Rust.sublime-syntax
• Reworked the syntax to follow conventions we've slowly been moving towards. Some of the changes include:
  • meta. scope for sections for larger sections of code
  • Symbol list support for structs, enums, impl, functions, closures and macros
  • Highlighting of various tokens using contextual information
  • Handling of formatting strings with various print/format/write macros
  • Special parsing of macro_rules! to more clearly highlight metavariables
  • Distinction between labels and lifetime indicators
• Added syntax_test_rust.rs to allow us to fix bugs and make tweaks, hopefully without any major regressions

Our plan is to include this in the next dev build. Anyone with the current Rust package installed via Package Control will not see this package when it is included. They would need to uninstall the version from Package Control to get all of the new features and enhancements.

It may be desirable for the Rust team to make a new release of the package for ST3 that includes an upgrade message indicating future changes will be available along with Sublime Text itself.

It is also possible that the name of the package could be changed from Rust to Rust (Old), or something of the like, to have users automatically start using the new version.

We can discuss these ideas at https://github.com/rust-lang/sublime-rust/issues if you'd like.

[Manishearth]

Thanks for doing this!

We'll coordinate further on rust-lang/rust-enhanced#72