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I'm currently working on a project similar to Tree-Sitter. Basically, it is going to be a full-featured Compiler front-end foundation library with incremental

I'm currently working on a project similar to Tree-Sitter. Basically, it is going to be a full-featured Compiler front-end foundation library with incremental parsing capabilities, error recovering, AST manipulations, etc, but written entirely in Rust, and hopefully with more user-friendly API for Rust devs. May I ask you to give me some feedback on your experience with Tree Sitter, and the challenges you faced during the development of your compiler's front-end? Thanks in advance!

tibordp 4y ago
Honestly, Tree Sitter is fantastic, I can highly recommend it. By far the most user friendly and powerful parser generator I've worked with. The C API is very nice. The only two pain point I had is that the `node-types.json` that's generated only contains the names of the nodes, not the numerical IDs. This means that if you have some codegen generating Rust enums is difficult if you want to avoid matching nodes by string. I wrote https://github.com/tibordp/tree-sitter-visitor https://github.com/tibordp/tree-sitter-visitor for generating visitor traits in Rust for a given grammar. I actually did it a bit differently in the end for Alumina, but it might come useful.