Tree-sitter

Health v2 · maintenance only

Adoption not part of the score

27097 stars · 2928 forks observed · 2026-10-01

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-10-05, confidence 0.98

Tree-sitter is a parser generator and incremental parsing library written in C with Rust bindings. It builds concrete syntax trees for source files and updates them efficiently as the code changes.

Use cases

• Generate a concrete syntax tree for a source file in an editor
• Provide real‑time syntax highlighting and error detection while typing
• Power language servers and IDE features with incremental parsing
• Create code analysis or refactoring tools that need up‑to‑date ASTs
• Embed a fast, dependency‑free parser in custom applications

When to choose

• You need fast, incremental parsing that updates on every keystroke
• Your tool must work with many programming languages without heavy dependencies
• You want a library that can be embedded in editors, IDEs, or language servers
• You require a pure C runtime that can also be used from Rust or WebAssembly

When to avoid

• You need deep semantic analysis or type checking beyond syntax
• Your project relies on a full compiler front‑end rather than just parsing
• You prefer a parser with built‑in code generation or interpretation capabilities

Facets

library · maturity active

parser cli developer-tools programming-languages windows wasm cli incremental-parsing syntax-tree rust c language-agnostic tree-sitter-cli linux macos

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="tree-sitter/tree-sitter")