Using syntax info for font-locking?

[spamfilteraccount]

Some people here

      http://erlide.sourceforge.net/

badmouths Emacs (the heretics! :), because it cannot provide as good
syntax highlighting for Erlang as their Eclipse-based Erlang IDE.

As far as I know they use the actual syntax information provided by an
Erlang node to do syntax highlighting.

I'm not very familiar with the implementation of font locking in Emacs.
If real-time syntax info for the current source file is available then
could Emacs use it for font locking?

Or font locking in Emacs is always static, done with predefined regexps
and stuff?