tree-sitter-c

Supporting C / C++ is in our roadmap. It needs some additional work to handle preprocessor directives [1] [2], which is why we didn't focus on it for the initial release. [1] https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-c/issues/13 [2] https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-c/issues/108

In my case, Tree-Sitter grammar for C has many shortcomings (ignore preprocessor bugs, they can't be solved in the current TS model anyway): https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-c/issues

The feature isn't working well yet on C and C++. If I recall correctly it's based on Tree-Sitter[1] parsing, and there are still too many bugs in corresponding grammars - tree-sitter-c[2] and tree-sitter-cpp[3]. Hopefully, it will be greatly improved in the future as the share of the existing and newly written code in C and C++ is quite significant. [1] https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/ [2] https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-c/issues [3] https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-cpp/issues

We do have C and C++ grammars [1,2] but they need some love. You're right that these two languages are among the hardest to support. You could get a tree-sitter external scanner to mimic the preprocessor without too much difficulty, but you'd still run into the problem that your macro definitions might appear in another file. Parsing in general is much easier to implement and reason about if the parse result depends only on the content of the single file that you're looking at. [1] https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-c [2] https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-cpp

I tried to use this to ease the front end work load of students in a compiler project (building a C compiler) for a University course, so that the project could be focused on the more interesting middle and back end parts of the compiler. However, reported bugs in the C grammar that saw no activity at all [1] made this impossible. From this small sample of experiences, I was left with the impression that Tree Sitter is great for things like syntax highlighting, where wrong results are annoying but not dramatic, but not so suitable for tools that need a really correct syntax tree. --- [1] https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-c/issues/51

This is a parser generator that I'm working on: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter It produces concrete syntax trees that can be queried by line or character index. The library is specifically focused on incremental parsing, for use in a text editor, but it also works fine for normal 'batch' parsing workloads. It has a simple C API that you should be able to use from any language. Currently, there are bindings to JavaScript and Haskell. Here are some example grammars: * C - https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-c * JavaScript - https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-javascript * Go - https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-go * Ruby - https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-ruby * Python - https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-python