COconartist6·Aug 20, 2025
We have some meaningful advantages that help us gain a practical edge on Tree-sitter:
- Our core and grammars are relatively tiny and can easily be loaded into any web page as a syntax highlighter, except actually a bit more: more like being able to embed ASTExplorer directly into your docs page or blog post to help people understand code examples.
- We support runtime extensibility of languages, e.g. TS can extend from JS at runtime. Tree-sitter only supports static linking, so every shipped language extended from their JS grammar contains a complete copy of the JS grammar.
- Our grammars are much easier to debug. They're written as plain scripts, and they can be run and debugged in exactly the form they're written in.
- We can parse inputs with embedding gaps. An example of such an input would be the content of a template tag before int
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erpolations have been applied. Parsing after interpolation opens the door to injection attacks, but parsing before interpolation allow safe composition of code fragments using template tags.
- We emit streaming parse results on the fly, and can parse infinitely long data streams with ease or syntax highlight. within large single-line files without freezing up
- Tree-sitter is half an IDE's state solution: "just add text buffer". Our solution is the whole thing. One stop shop. IDE in a box.
- CSTML lets us do round trip serialization of any tree and also gives our trees stable hashes. Tree-sitter could trivially represent its parse results as CSTML if it cared to, giving it competitive compatibility with BABLR. A rising tide lifts all boats.
- While they're setting out to make version control for the first time now, we're already basically as powerful as git thanks to the combination of hashed trees, immutable data, and btree amortization within nodes for maximum structural reuse of data.
- Did I mention you don't have to deal with this? https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter-typescript/blob/m...
- We can probably literally just run the Javascript source code for Tree-sitter grammars on our runtime. The only problem is the C lexers, but C lexers are one of the great annoyances of tree-sitter anyway since any context in the grammar requires you to hand-write the lexer