tree-sitter/tree-sitter

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

26764 stars · 2847 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

Tree-sitter is a parser generator tool and incremental parsing library that builds concrete syntax trees for source files and efficiently updates them as edits occur. Its runtime is written in pure C with bindings for Rust, WebAssembly, and other languages, making it embeddable in editors and programming tools.

Use cases

• build syntax highlighting for a code editor
• parse source code incrementally on every keystroke
• write a grammar for a new programming language
• analyze or refactor code with a concrete syntax tree
• parse code robustly even with syntax errors
• embed a fast parser in a Rust or C application

When to choose

• you need fast, incremental re-parsing of edited source files
• you want error-tolerant parsing that still yields useful trees
• you need a dependency-free C runtime embeddable anywhere
• you're building editor features like highlighting, folding, or code navigation

When to avoid

• you only need one-off parsing with no incremental updates
• you need full semantic analysis or type checking rather than syntax trees
• your target format is data (JSON/YAML) rather than programming languages

Facets

library · maturity stable

parser interpreter developer-tools parsers programming-languages developer-tools text-editors cross-platform rust cpp wasm python cli parser-generator syntax-highlighting concrete-syntax-tree error-tolerant-parsing editor-integration code-analysis nodejs

Member repositories

For agents

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