acornjs/acorn

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

11440 stars · 1043 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

Acorn is a small, fast JavaScript parser written entirely in JavaScript that produces an ECMAScript syntax tree (AST). It ships as three packages: the main parser, an error-tolerant loose parser, and a syntax tree walker, and supports plugins for parsing JavaScript dialects like JSX.

Use cases

• parse JavaScript source code into an AST
• build a linter or code analysis tool for JavaScript
• write a transpiler or code transformer
• parse incomplete or broken JavaScript with error tolerance
• traverse and inspect JavaScript syntax trees
• add support for JSX or other JS dialects via plugins

When to choose

• you need a lightweight, dependency-free JavaScript parser in JS itself
• you are building tooling like linters, minifiers, bundlers, or formatters
• you need a plugin system to parse JavaScript dialects
• you need error-tolerant parsing of broken code via acorn-loose

When to avoid

• you need to parse languages other than JavaScript/ECMAScript
• you need the absolute fastest native parser and can accept a compiled dependency
• you need a full compiler framework with code generation built in

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser developer-tools parsers programming-languages developer-tools web-development browser ecmascript ast syntax-tree javascript-parser error-tolerant-parsing nodejs javascript

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markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="acornjs/acorn")