tree-sitter VS difftastic

I learned from a google search that these days upstream tree-sitter provides WebAssembly bindings.

Source: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/tree/master/lib/b...

NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/web-tree-sitter

Download from the latest Github release: js file (https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/releases/download...) and wasm file (https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/releases/download...)

Tree-sitter optimizes for performance (to use in editors), not for correctness. In fact even TS' core developers advocate for not bothering too much with correctness of grammars[1]. I imagine this constraint would be a deal-breaker for GitHub or anyone else in their position.

[1] https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/issues/130#issuec...

This is a plugin that provides a simple way to use the tree-sitter in Neovim and also provides functionalities like highlighting, etc.

From the tree-sitter side, I am tracking https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/issues/1942

Is tree-sitter really slower than TextMate grammars? Some benchmarks indicate that this isn't really the case [1]. On the other hand, breaking parse trees is a real issue, because the error-recovery in tree-sitter is pretty rudimentary [2][3], but as you said, it's not an issue for Shiki.

Several TextMate grammars suffer from inaccuracy bugs, and issues of maintainability. Perhaps the biggest hindrance in the adoption of tree-sitter, is that the most popular editor, VSCode, still doesn't support it.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/pull/161479

[2]: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/issues/1870

[3]: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/issues/224

u/lewis6991 I think the biggest performance gain was made by tree-sitter itself: https://github.com/tree-sitter/tree-sitter/pull/2085

I asked on the repo's discussions but responses are limited and not explanatory (I'm not shaming anyone here, discussions aren't a place for detailed how-tos and documentations anyway).

The following discussion here. TS query cannot be incremental, that is why I regard it as design fault.

Hi, so I've recently decided to give Neovim yet another try, this time using some predefined plugins with kickstart.nvim, for syntax it uses tree-sitter.

i want a diff tool that shows me exactly which tokens have changed, and which haven't, regardless of how they are laid out.

These already exist: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

when we get that, then we should get even less merge conflicts.

Counterintuitively, that is not the case. AST-merge is a much, much, much, much, much harder problem than AST-diff.

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic?tab=readme-ov-file#can...

The fact that diffs can be used to drive a 3-way merge is in fact an accidental property that arises due to the sheer crudeness of the diff format. As soon as you start using more-sophisticated diff formats, solutions to "the diff problem" no longer lead directly to solutions to "the merge problem".

Yes there is an `—-override` option you can use to specify the language in which a file should be parsed.

https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/blob/master/CHANGELOG....

Use the fantastic difftastic instead of git's diff. https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/

  [alias]

difftastic provides similar capabilities in a free tool based on treesitter

difftastic? https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

If you're looking for a VS Code extension or a GitHub app, check out https://semanticdiff.com/. I'm a co-founder of this project.

If you prefer a CLI tool, check out https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic. It supports more languages, but doesn't recognize when code has been replaced by an equivalent version ("invariances"). So it will show some changes (e.g. replacing a character in a string with an escape sequence) even though they are technically equivalent.

Shameless plug: I've written difftastic[1], a tool that builds ASTs and then does a structural diff of them. You can use it with git too.

It's an incredibly hard problem though, both from a computational complexity point of view, and trying to build a comprehensible UI once you've done the structural AST diff.

[1]: https://github.com/wilfred/difftastic

There is a diff tool called difftastic: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

The idea is that it does not show diff based on text change, but on syntastic meaning. For that, it uses tree-sitter.

I think it still shows the trailing comma in the situation as shown in the article, but it's quite different experience than the standard text based diff.