Show HN: I ported Tree-sitter to Go

162 points - today at 6:28 PM


This started as a hard requirement for my TUI-based editor application, it ended up going in a few different directions.

A suite of tools that help with semantic code entities: https://github.com/odvcencio/gts-suite

A next-gen version control system called Got: https://github.com/odvcencio/got

I think this has some pretty big potential! I think there's many classes of application (particularly legacy architecture) that can benefit from these kinds of analysis tooling. My next post will be about composing all these together, an exciting project I call GotHub. Thanks!

Source

Comments

sluongng today at 7:01 PM
Oh this is really neat for the Bazel community, as depending on tree-sitter to build a gazelle language extension, with Gazelle written in Go, requires you to use CGO.

Now perhaps we can get rid of the CGO dependency and make it pure Go instead. I have pinged some folks to take a look at it.

herrington_d today at 11:11 PM
I also have a tree-sitter Rust rewrite. Though I cannot find it more useful for end users... https://github.com/HerringtonDarkholme/tree-sitter
3rly today at 7:07 PM
Wouldn't `got` be confused with OpenBSD's Got: https://gameoftrees.org/index.html
trickypr today at 8:27 PM
Do you have an equivalent of TreeCursors or tree-sitter-generate?

There are at least some use cases where neither queries nor walks are suitable. And I have run into cases where being able to regenerate and compile grammars on the fly is immeasurably helpful.

At least for my use cases, this would be unusable.

Also, what the hell is this:

> partial [..] missing external scanner

Why do you have a parsing mode that guarantees incorrect outputs on some grammars (html comes to mind) and then use it as your “90x faster” benchmark figure?

shayief today at 8:23 PM
This is great, I was looking for something like this, thanks for making this!

I imagine this can very useful for Go-based forges that need syntax highlighting (i.e. Gitea, Forgejo).

I have a strict no-cgo requirement, so I might use it in my project, which is Git+JJ forge https://gitncoffee.com.

acedTrex today at 8:17 PM
Claude attempted a treesitter to go port

Better title

gritzko today at 7:37 PM
That is very very interesting. I work on a similar project https://replicated.wiki/blog/partII.html

I use CRDT merge though, cause 3-way metadata-less merges only provide very incremental improvements over e.g. git+mergiraf.

How do you see got's main improvement over git?

conartist6 today at 8:03 PM
It looks like porting the custom C lexers is a big part of the trouble you had to go to do this.
jbreckmckye today at 8:00 PM
Interesting. I have a similar usecase but intended to use CGo tree-sitter with Zig

Are these pretty up-to-date grammars? I'm awfully tempted to switch to your project

How large are your binaries getting? I was concerned about the size of some of the grammars

skybrian today at 7:43 PM
How about making 'got' compatible with git repos like jujutsu? It would be a lot easier to try out.
up2isomorphism today at 9:31 PM
"rewrite" a nice code base without mentioning it is vibe coded is not great.

Essentially you use AI to somehow re-implement the original code base in a different language, made it somehow work, and claim it is xx times faster. It is misleading.

irishcoffee today at 7:54 PM
Is it a go-ism that source for implementation and test code lives in the root of the repo or is this an LLM thing?