Rust-sitter: Define your entire tree-sitter grammar in Rust code
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Rust-sitter: Define your entire tree-sitter grammar in Rust code
#2Hi! Rust Sitter creator here, happy to answer any questions about the project and where it's going!
Re: Rust-sitter: Define your entire tree-sitter grammar in Rust code
#3Are there any benefits for users that tree-sitter is used under the hood? Can we benefit from the killer features of tree-sitter? Namely incremental parsing, fallible parsing, lossless syntax tree, or being embeddable into editors supporting tree-sitter syntax highlighting?
Re: Rust-sitter: Define your entire tree-sitter grammar in Rust code
#4Hi! Rust Sitter creator here, happy to answer any questions about the project and where it's going!
Great project!
I'm curious about the set of available parser annotations. I went through the list but I didn't see anything which allows for optional elements. One example would be dangling commas. Did I miss it or are there plans to support such constructs?
Re: Rust-sitter: Define your entire tree-sitter grammar in Rust code
#5Are there any benefits for users that tree-sitter is used under the hood? Can we benefit from the killer features of tree-sitter? Namely incremental parsing, fallible parsing, lossless syntax tree, or being embeddable into editors supporting tree-sitter syntax highlighting?
Yes! Right now, the main benefits are the ability to write grammar definitions that are quite close to the ideal AST structure (made possible by Tree Sitter's grammar format), and being able to embed the parser in many different applications (including WASM via https://github.com/shadaj/tree-sitter-c2rust). Rust Sitter also gives quite nice error diagnostics with spans thanks to Tree Sitter's recovery logic.
Fallible parsing is something I plan to implement in the very near future, by letting users wrap types in `Result` to mark them as an error boundary. Incremental parsing is a bit more difficult, since we'll need to add logic to know when an existing AST struct can be reused, but is on the roadmap.
Re: Rust-sitter: Define your entire tree-sitter grammar in Rust code
#6Hi! Rust Sitter creator here, happy to answer any questions about the project and where it's going!
Great project! I'm curious about the set of available parser annotations. I went through the list but I didn't see anything which allows for optional elements. One example would be dangling commas. Did I miss it or are there plans to support such constructs?
We support optional elements by wrapping them in `Option` (other annotations are applied to the contents of the option)! So you can define
struct ... {
...
#[rust_sitter::leaf(text = ",")
_dangling_comma: Option
}Re: Rust-sitter: Define your entire tree-sitter grammar in Rust code
#7What's the advantage of defining the grammar in Rust? JavaScript is admittedly an odd choice, but it works, there are a ton of grammars out there and it isn't needed at runtime.
Changing the runtime to Rust is very useful though - I've wanted that for a long time to make WASM and cross compilation easier.
Re: Rust-sitter: Define your entire tree-sitter grammar in Rust code
#8Are there any benefits for users that tree-sitter is used under the hood? Can we benefit from the killer features of tree-sitter? Namely incremental parsing, fallible parsing, lossless syntax tree, or being embeddable into editors supporting tree-sitter syntax highlighting?
Yes! Right now, the main benefits are the ability to write grammar definitions that are quite close to the ideal AST structure (made possible by Tree Sitter's grammar format), and being able to embed the parser in many different applications (including WASM via https://github.com/shadaj/tree-sitter-c2rust ). Rust Sitter also gives quite nice error diagnostics with spans thanks to Tree Sitter's recovery logic. Fallibl…
I would like to delve into the compatibility with tree-sitter, since in other features tree-sitter being under the hood is mostly an implementation detail:
If I were to write my parser using rust-sitter, would I be able to still generate the final standalone tree-sitter parser as a `.so`? That way I could integrate with tools supporting tree-sitter parsers (for instance https://github.com/nvim-treesitter/nvim-treesitter#language-...) without having to write the `.js` grammar?
Re: Rust-sitter: Define your entire tree-sitter grammar in Rust code
#9I'm super excited about the ability to get good quality bindings to tree-sitter! Tree-sitter is a very cool project but it needs a little love in a few regards. A better WebAssembly story, good bindings, and the ability to construct trees synthetically (to facilitate code generation) would make it a really remarkable tool.
As for rust-sitter, it's a very promising direction. The error story needs a little work. I found it pretty hard to debug issues with my grammar. And it is slightly annoying having all those extra () fields in the struct, but that's really a minor complaint.
Re: Rust-sitter: Define your entire tree-sitter grammar in Rust code
#10What's the advantage of defining the grammar in Rust? JavaScript is admittedly an odd choice, but it works, there are a ton of grammars out there and it isn't needed at runtime. Changing the runtime to Rust is very useful though - I've wanted that for a long time to make WASM and cross compilation easier.
The ability to define the grammar via high quality Rust bindings is pretty inspired imo. It gets you waaaay better bindings than the homogenous Node type that tree-sitter provides you.