4 ms·

tree sitter seems to do pretty well in its limited role; why is this unfortunate in your opinion?

• NateEag 3y ago
  Not OP, but I think their point was clear - they seem to wish that compilers offered their own ASTs / tools for working with ASTs, so that tools like tree-sitter wouldn't exist at all. It makes sense - tree-sitter is in large part a reimplementation of many, many parsers, and supporting a new language means duplicating yet another parser. The tree-sitter grammars are doomed by nature to forever chase the latest features in any evolving language, and reaching full compatibility turns out to be a ton of effort in many cases. That said, language design being the freewheeling "if you can dream it, you can make it" thing it is, though, I doubt it's realistic to expect every language to have a fully-reusable, standardized parser - people just won't ever be that consistent, IMO. Those who want consistency will need to provide it themselves, in the form of tools like tree-sitter.
  • funcDropShadow 3y ago
    > Those who want consistency will need to provide it themselves, in the form of tools like tree-sitter. Or in the form of radical simplicity. For the purpose of the parents discussion Lisp is the ultimate minimal language. Since, the syntax is its own AST. Other aspects of most Lisp are certainly not so simple.