"Tree-sitter - a new parsing system for programming tools" by Max Brunsfeld

Why HN readers recommended it

HN points to it as the best explanation of tree-sitter's design choices and as an accessible introduction to parser generators.

This is a summary from the source dataset, not an endorsement by Hacker News or the video creator.

Video & recommendation details

Creator / channel

Strange Loop Conference

Topic

incremental parsing with tree-sitter

Format

talk

Level

intermediate

HN recommenders in dataset

4

HN mentions in dataset

5

Recommendation years in dataset

2018–2024

These counts and years describe the included Hacker News records; they are not YouTube views or the video’s publication date.

From the original HN conversations

Excerpts from the recorded comments. Follow each source for the full comment and surrounding discussion.

• 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 …

• For a really nice solution to the error message problem, see this recent strangeloop talk: [VIDEO] Basically it uses the parse tree disambiguation from the GLR parser to look for the most likely mistake the user made - it's very clever.

• It's great to see more tools adopting tree-sitter [1]. Having a (fast) single tool that can accurately parse most commonly used programming languages is incredibly useful, but it requires the maintenance of dozens of grammars, which is difficult without a large community effort. Hopefully increased …