Absolutely agreed, and copying from a comment I wrote last year: I think the fact that tree-sitter is dependency-free is worth highlighting. For context, some of my teammates maintain the OCaml tree-sitter bindings and often contribute to grammars as part of our work on Semgrep (Semgrep uses tree-sitter for searching code and parsing queries that are code snippets themselves into AST matchers).
Often when writing a linter, you need to bring along the runtime of the language you're targeting. E.g., in python if you're writing a parser using the builtin `ast` module, you need to match the language version & features. So you can't parse Python 3 code with Pylint running on Python 2.7, for instance. This ends up being more obnoxious than you'd think at first, especially if you're targeting multiple languages.
Before tree-sitter, using a language's built-in AST tooling was often the best approach because it is guaranteed to keep up with the latest syntax. IMO the genius of tree-sitter is that it's made it way easier than with traditional grammars to keep the language parsers updated. Highly recommend Max Brunsfield's strange loop talk if you want to learn more about the design choices behind tree-sitter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jes3bD6P0To
And this has resulted in a bunch of new tools built off on tree-sitter, off the top of my head in addition to difftastic: neovim, Zed, Semgrep, and Github code search!
LSP support is semi-built-in, but lots of improvements to come in that area apparently to support more language servers. With Python, it currently only has Pyright built-in which is more of an annoyance if you're working with code where the venv is inside a container but there's very active tickets on their GitHub about building out the LSP support. I currently use it as my second editor - I have Sublime set up to be pretty much perfect for my usage, but Zed is catching up fast. I find I'm very fussy about editors, I can't get on with VSCode at all, but I feel warm and fuzzy toward Zed - the UX is great, performance superb, external LSP support is probably the one feature stopping me using it as my primary editor.
I tried Vs code a ton of times. It is reasonably good, but I am SO used to Emacs that it is almost impossible to move from there for me.
Vs code is better at debugging and maybe slightly better at remote connections, that yes. But for the rest of things I am way more productive with Emacs than anything else.
Okay, but how does that work with language versions? Like, if I get a "C++ parser" for tree-sitter, how do I know if it's C++03, C++17, C++21 or what? Last time I checked (which was months ago, to be fair), this wasn't documented anywhere, nor were there apparent any mechanisms to support langauge versions and variants.
The second doc has a year in the title, so it's ancient af.
The first one has multiple `C++0x` red marks (whatever that mean, afair that's how C++11 was named before standardization). It mentions `constexpr`, but doesn't know `consteval`, for example. And doesn't even mention any of C++11 attributes, such as [[noreturn]], so despite the "Last updated: 10-Aug-2021", it's likely pre-C++11 and is also ancient af and have no use in a real world.
Often when writing a linter, you need to bring along the runtime of the language you're targeting. E.g., in python if you're writing a parser using the builtin `ast` module, you need to match the language version & features. So you can't parse Python 3 code with Pylint running on Python 2.7, for instance. This ends up being more obnoxious than you'd think at first, especially if you're targeting multiple languages.
Before tree-sitter, using a language's built-in AST tooling was often the best approach because it is guaranteed to keep up with the latest syntax. IMO the genius of tree-sitter is that it's made it way easier than with traditional grammars to keep the language parsers updated. Highly recommend Max Brunsfield's strange loop talk if you want to learn more about the design choices behind tree-sitter: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jes3bD6P0To
And this has resulted in a bunch of new tools built off on tree-sitter, off the top of my head in addition to difftastic: neovim, Zed, Semgrep, and Github code search!