What do you think about Tree-sitter?

[iahung4]

It's a more modern and advanced parser than ctags:

https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/

[elextr]

Parsing is not sufficient for new languages, it needs semantics as well.

For example inferred types need semantics like type evaluation of expressions, for example C++ auto f = 1 + 1.0; has to know the semantics of mixed type arithmetic 1 + 1.0 to get the result type as float and then bind that type to f. New languages like Julia and Rust and Go, many functional languages like Haskell and Ocaml and retrofits to languages like C++ and Java provide capabilities like this.

Type evaluation of expressions requires full knowledge of visibility, what parts of the system libraries and user code is visible at the point of set(a, 1); to decide which set() function is going to be called (there are lots of set() functions in libraries and user code), and so what the return type is, so it can be used in auto a1 = set(a, 1); as the type of a1.

It needs more than a parser to perform these computations. The current technology solving it is the Language Server Protocol which is a way for the IDE to send the work to a separate process that contains most of the compiler except the code generation so the workload of a compiler does not interrupt the UI. Many language projects are providing LSP compliant servers, like clangd from the clang C/C++ compiler project or gopls from the Go language project.

There is work in progress to integrate such servers with Geany.

Edit: Just to be clear, while some of the ctags parsers could be improved, the effort of changing all the support infrastructure to a different set of parsers isn't worth it. Until the proper solution is available spend the effort improving ctags parsers (within its limitations) and a bunch of other projects will benefit as well.