alt Hacker News>It is possible to use the language server for syntax highlighting. I am not aware of any particularly strong reasons why one would want to (or not want to) do this.
Hmm, the strong reason could be latency and layout stability. Tree-sitter parses on the main thread (or a close worker) typically in sub-ms timeframes, ensuring that syntax coloring is synchronous with keystrokes. LSP semantic tokens are asynchronous by design. If you rely solely on LSP for highlighting, you introduce a flash of unstyled content or color-shifting artifacts every time you type, because the round-trip to the server (even a local one) and the subsequent re-tokenization takes longer than the frame budget.
The ideal hygiene could be something like -> tree-sitter provides the high-speed lexical coloring (keywords, punctuation, basic structure) instantly and LSP paints the semantic modifiers (interfaces vs classes, mutable vs const) asynchronously like 200ms later. Relying on LSP for the base layer makes the editor feel sluggish.
That's generally how it works in most editors that support both.
Tree-sitter has okay error correction, and that along with speed (as you mentioned) and its flexible query language makes it a winner for people to quickly iterate on a working parser but also obviously integration into an actual editor.
Oh, and some LSPs use tree-sitter to parse.