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These tools simply don’t work well on anything more complicated than S-expressions. Every time I look into this space I end up disappointed.

Someone is working on tree-sitter for Perl too: https://github.com/ganezdragon/tree-sitter-perl

Which is supposed to be difficult, if not impossible: https://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=663393

I suppose, though, if it's for diffs and syntax highlighting, flaws matter less.

Yeah I honestly wouldn't mind it even if it's a text-based heuristic; anything that's an improvement over line-by-line diff is a big win. I'm just wondering whether/how it's actually doing what it's actually advertised as doing, since it seems so much more difficult.

Short answer is that it doesn't: it lets tree-sitter do the heavy lifting to parse everything

Thanks! But then I guess my question is how does tree-sitter do it? I assume it has to choke on at least macros, right? Or does it call the actual compiler routines (like libclang)?