/gempesaw/writing

I started seeing the following timer error in mooz's js2-mode, the actively maintained fork of Steve Yegge's js2-mode. This would happen whenever I changed any javascript code, and the mode wouldn't rehighlight the new code. Invoking js2-mode interactively would properly apply the syntax highlighting, but then the next change to the file would cause the error again.

 timer-set-function: Wrong type argument: timerp, [t nil nil nil nil nil nil nil]

There is also a fork of this fork, js3-mode, which was working fine for me, but unfortunately skewer-mode is only compatible with the AST generated from js2-mode. I'd guess that making skewer-mode compatible with js3-mode might be just a change to a variable name or something, but I wasn't too interested in digging into that on my own.

I'm unfortunately not sure what caused the issue for me. According to the solution, it seems to have been updating to Emacs 24.3 instead of 24.2, but I hadn't recently updated my Emacs. Either way, I was fortunate enough to find a solution in an issue on Github. It seems that the culprit is stale bytecode compiled by 24.2 that is invalid on 24.3 So, as described in the issue, recompiling js2-mode and restarting Emacs fixed it for me as well:

(byte-recompile-directory
  (expand-file-name "~/.emacs.d/elpa/js2-mode-20130307.2012/") 0 t)

You'll have to replace the js2-mode version string with the date of your actual js2-mode folder. byte-recompile-directory also works recursively, so it can be applied to the ~/.emacs.d/elpa folder to recompile all of the elpa packages, or the ~/.emacs.d/ folder to do your entire init folder.