tree-sitter Use tabs only in recipes so as to avoid confusing 'make'

Some version of make that we run on Windows (Cygwin) chokes on a tab on line 32 with the following error message:

Makefile:32: *** recipe commences before first target.  Stop.

I don't know why this problem is showing up only now. Also, we don't have this error on other platforms (Linux, MacOS). We're in the process of upgrading tree-sitter from 0.20 to 0.22.6. I didn't spot a change in the makefile that would suddenly cause this error.

I apologize for not taking the time to reproduce the error outside of our private CI system. However, I think it's good hygiene to not use tabs outside of recipes anyway.

Jun 13 '24 07:06 mjambon

Windows is not supported by the Makefile. The issue here is that it fails without printing the actual error.

Jun 13 '24 09:06 ObserverOfTime

Windows is not supported by the Makefile

Has it changed since 0.20.6? I know 0.20.6 is old but it was working fine for us.

This commit introduces:

ifeq ($(OS),Windows_NT)
	$(error "Windows is not supported")

Are there instructions on how to build tree-sitter on Windows/Cygwin?

Jun 13 '24 22:06 mjambon

Great news: I found out that building tree-sitter 0.22.6 works for us on Windows (after removing the ifeq ($(OS),Windows_NT)). We run the following commands:

        make PREFIX="$prefix" CFLAGS="-O3 -Wall -Wextra"
        make PREFIX="$prefix" install

(copy-pasted from our CI job)

It uses CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc for the compiler.

I also see this comment in our CI:

        # tree-sitter fails to compile without an ar, you can use
        # CC=x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc but there is no AR=x86_64-w64-mingw32-ar
        which ar
        ar --version

Jun 14 '24 01:06 mjambon

I found out that building tree-sitter 0.22.6 works for us on Windows

It works in shells that emulate Unix and builds Unix-like libraries. It does not (normally) work in PowerShell or CMD and can't build DLLs. It's not easy to support Windows in Makefiles, and CMake was rejected in the past.

Are there instructions on how to build tree-sitter on Windows/Cygwin?

You can build a static library via zig. A shared library can also be built by adapting build.zig (PR welcome).

Jun 14 '24 10:06 ObserverOfTime

Are there instructions on how to build tree-sitter on Windows/Cygwin?

You can build a static library via zig. A shared library can also be built by adapting build.zig (PR welcome).

As reported earlier, it works on Cygwin. All we need is a Windows check that excludes Cygwin.

The following should work. I can test it and make a PR:

ifneq ($(OSTYPE),cygwin)
  ...
endif

Jun 15 '24 00:06 mjambon

All we need is a Windows check that excludes Cygwin.

What about MSYS, MinGW, or Git Bash?

Jun 15 '24 08:06 ObserverOfTime

I wasn't able to modify the makefile so that it only produces an error for a non-Cygwin Windows environment. I don't have access to a Windows machine, only to a Github Actions job that was set up by someone else. As usual, this comes with no shell access. The approaches I tried are:

using Bash to make it print the value of the OSTYPE variable (OSTYPE := $(shell bash -c 'echo "$$OSTYPE"')), expecting cygwin.
using uname -s and check if its output starts with CYGWIN.

:man_shrugging:

Meanwhile we're using a patched makefile that removes the check for Windows.

Jun 19 '24 02:06 mjambon

Both of those approaches will fail on PowerShell/CMD. The Makefile can't properly support Windows without significant hacks. We would have to adapt build.zig and/or add a CMakeLists.txt file.

Jun 19 '24 07:06 ObserverOfTime

@maxbrunsfeld @amaanq can we merge this? (not sure what's going on with the CI failure). Also looks like Martin and I are not part of the tree-sitter org anymore. When was this changed?

Jun 19 '24 10:06 aryx