alt Hacker NewsThis is like the difference between an orange and fruit juice. You can squeeze an orange to extract its juices, but that is not the only thing you can do with it, nor is it the only way to make fruit juice.
I use tree-sitter for developing a custom programming language, you still need an extra step to get from CST to AST, but the overall DevEx is much quicker that hand-rolling the parser.
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> extra step to get from CST to AST
Could you elaborate on what this involves? I'm also looking at using tree-sitter as a parser for a new language, possibly to support multiple syntaxes. I'm thinking of converting its parse trees to a common schema, that's the target language.
I guess I don't quite get the difference between a concrete and abstract syntax tree. Is it just that the former includes information that's irrelevant to the semantics of the language, like whitespace?
Yeah, you can even use tree-sitter to implement a language server, I've done this for a custom scripting language we use at work.
N00b question: Language parsers gives me concrete information, like “com.foo.bar.Baz is defined here”. Does tree sitter do that or does it say “this file has a symbol declaration for Baz” and elsewhere for that file “there is a package statement for ‘com.foo.bar’” and then I have to figure that out?
Every time I get to sing Treesitters praise, I take the opportunity to. I love it so much. I've tried a bunch of parser generators, and the TS approach is so simple and so good that I'll probably never use anything else. The iteration speed lets me get into a zen-like state where I just think about syntax design, and I don't sweat the technical bits.