expose only the positions of those brackets colored by native bracket pair colorization

Question: I know exposing tokens to extensions is a headache, but is it now possible and non-headache to expose only the positions of those brackets colored by native bracket pair colorization? like this: {type: "{" | "}" | "(" | ")" | "[" | "]"; line: number; column: number; }[] or like this: {type: "{" | "}" | "(" | ")" | "[" | "]"; globalStringIndex: number; }[]

No tree structure needed, just a simple array of positions. It will be super huge speed upgrade for Blockman (already 19k installs).

_Originally posted by @leodevbro in https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/128465#issuecomment-900604355_

[leodevbro]

getBracketPairs is async. When the call returns, the text buffer could have already been modified and not agree with content anymore.

In case of Blockman extension, I guess currently it works basically that way, when typing text on keyboard Blockman cannot analyze updated content quickly enough to keep up the changes in real time, so it deals with timers (It’s like a refresh rate or frames per second in video games. If refresh rate is low, the game will have less CPU/GPU overload and will be more performant). On each text change event, Blockman starts re-analyzing the file after t seconds. If we set the t to be 0 seconds, the editor UI will most likely freeze during typing some text on the keyboard, so, that’s why the default time is 1.2 seconds. The freezing is still noticeable during typing, but it’s not a deal breaker for many coders because it feels rare and short.

Note: the timer is triggered only for the last change event and is not triggered on every event during the 1.2 seconds, so it will not get overloaded and bounced.

So, yeah, with Blockman, if text changes during the ongoing analyzing/rendering process, the blocks will be rendered for the old text, so it will look incorrect visually, but Blockman detects the change events and re-renders the blocks again with the new content. So the blocks finally are being rendered correctly. So, I guess the the blocks appear incorrect for about 1 second (average time) when working on a 5,000 line file, but if it will have access to the native tokens of brackets, I think this average time will go down to maybe 0.1 seconds, and so it will feel more comfy.

[hediet]

The problem is this:

const content = this.document.getText();
const bracketPairs = await vscode.languages.getBracketPairs(this.document.uri, this.getViewPortRange());
// use content and bracket pairs to create decorations

How can we prevent someone from doing this? The issue here is that getBracketPairs is async. When the call returns, the text buffer could have already been modified and not agree with content anymore.