Show HN: I ported Tree-sitter to Go (github.com)
146 points by odvcencio 4 hours ago
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!
sluongng 3 hours ago
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.
dilyevsky 10 minutes ago
would also be nice to have this support gopackagesdriver backend
odvcencio 3 hours ago
thanks so much for the note! i really appreciate it. i built this precisely for folks like yourself with this specific pain, thanks again!
3rly 3 hours ago
Wouldn't `got` be confused with OpenBSD's Got: https://gameoftrees.org/index.html
odvcencio 3 hours ago
oh wow! i really thought i was being too clever but i shouldve assumed nothing new under the sun. well im taking name suggestions now!
allknowingfrog 2 hours ago
Well, find and sed have modern "fd" and "sd" alternatives. Naming it "gt" allows you to claim that your version save 33% compared to typing "git".
boobsbr 3 hours ago
Goty McGotface
Imustaskforhelp 2 hours ago
uGOT / uGOTme? (sort of like the idea behind uTorrent) but I will agree that sbankowi's idea of Yet another got is great as well. +1 to that as well.
sbankowi 3 hours ago
YAGOT (Yet Another GOT)
bityard 2 hours ago
trickypr 2 hours ago
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?
odvcencio 2 hours ago
the 90x figure is on Go source for apples to apples against CGO bound tree-sitter.
your use case is not one i designed for although yeah maybe the readme has some sections too close. the only external scanner missing atm is norg. now that i know your use case i can probably think of a way to close it
trickypr an hour ago
So your benchmarks are primarily just “how fast is go’s c interop” rather than any algorithmic improvement on tree-sitter?
Edit: yep, you are just calling a c function in a loop. So your no-op benchmark is just the time it takes for cgo to function. I would not be able to get any perf benefits from e.g. rust
shayief 2 hours ago
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.
odvcencio 2 hours ago
thank you for the kind words! Very cool project! Very happy you can find some utility in it
acedTrex 2 hours ago
Claude attempted a treesitter to go port
Better title
gritzko 2 hours ago
I work on a revision control system project, except merge is CRDT. On Feb 22 there was a server break-in (I did not keep unencrypted sources on the client, server login was YubiKey only, but that is not 100% guarantee). I reported break-in to my Telegram channel that day.
My design docs https://replicated.wiki/blog/partII.html
I used tree-sitter for coarse AST. Some key parts were missing from the server as well, because I expected problems (had lots of adventures in East Asia, evil maids, various other incidents on a regular basis).
When I saw "tree-sitter in go" title, I was very glad at first. Solves some problems for me. Then I saw the full picture.
ctmnt an hour ago
Wait, are you suggesting that OP broke in to your server and stole code and is republishing it as these repos?
I have questions. Have you reviewed the code here to see if it matches? What, more specifically, do you mean when you say someone broke in? What makes you think that this idea (which is nice but not novel) is worth stealing? If that sounds snarky, it’s not meant to; just trying to understand what’s going on. Why is that more likely than someone using Claude to vibe up some software along the same lines?
gritzko an hour ago
ctmnt an hour ago
Also, evil maids, what?
atonse an hour ago
thebackup an hour ago
This was my first thought as well, just from reading the title.
red_hare 2 hours ago
How is OP using Claude relevant?
gritzko 2 hours ago
OK for prototyping. Not OK for prod use if noone actually read it line by line.
odvcencio 2 hours ago
znpy an hour ago
atonse 43 minutes ago
ks2048 an hour ago
People should say what models/tools they used in even show the prompts.
up2isomorphism 42 minutes ago
Because OP obviously downplayed this important fact, which typically shows lower quality/less tested code.
DeepYogurt 2 hours ago
maintenance burden
IshKebab 2 hours ago
AI often produces nonsense that a human wouldn't. If a project was written using AI the chances that it is a useless mess are significantly higher than if it was written by a human.
odvcencio 2 hours ago
well how did it do?
ctmnt an hour ago
Hard to say. Claude’s very good at writing READMEs. In fact, Copilot often complains about docs that sound like they’re about current capabilities when in fact they’re future plans or just plan aspirational.
Without downloading and testing out your software, how can we know if it’s any good? Why would we do that if it’s obviously vibed? The dilemma.
I’m not at all against vibe coding. I’m just pointing out that having a nice README is trivial. And the burden of proof is on you.
wocram 2 hours ago
Shouldn't you be able to answer that?
odvcencio 2 hours ago
gritzko 3 hours ago
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?
odvcencio 2 hours ago
primarily, got is structural VCS intended for concurrent edits of the same file.
it does this via gotreesitter and gts-suite abstractions that enable it to: - have entity-aware diffs - not line by line but function by function - structural blame - attribution resolution for the lifetime of the entity - semver from structure - it can recommend bumps because it knows what is breaking change vs minor vs patch - entity history - because entities are tracked independently, file renames or moves dont affect the entity's history
when gotreesitter cant parse a language, the 3way text merge happens as a fallback. what the structural merge enables is no conflicts unless same entity has conflicting changes
gritzko 2 hours ago
I think I understand the situation.
odvcencio 2 hours ago
gah,. sincere apologies for formatting of this post. i ahve been on HN for basically 10 years now without ever having made a post (:
dorianmariecom 2 hours ago
conartist6 2 hours ago
It looks like porting the custom C lexers is a big part of the trouble you had to go to do this.
odvcencio 2 hours ago
yes basically about 70% of the engineering effort was spent porting the external scanners and ensuring parity with original (C) tree-sitter
jbreckmckye 2 hours ago
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
odvcencio 2 hours ago
206 binary blobs = 15MB, so not crazy but i built for this use case where you can declare the registry of languages you want to load and not have to own all the grammar binaries by default
jbreckmckye 2 hours ago
If all the languages together add up to 15MB that is a game changer for me.
It means the CLI I am working on can ship support for many languages whilst still being a smallish (sub 50mb) download
I shall definitely check it out!
odvcencio 2 hours ago
skybrian 3 hours ago
How about making 'got' compatible with git repos like jujutsu? It would be a lot easier to try out.
odvcencio 2 hours ago
it is interoperable with git. we like git when its good but attempted to ease the pains in UX somewhat. you can take advantage of got locally but still push it to git remote forges jsut the same. when you pull stuff in this way, got will load the entity history into the git repo ensuring that you can still do got stuff locally (inspect entity histories, etc)
up2isomorphism an hour ago
"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.
odvcencio 12 minutes ago
i really appreciated this comment the most because of how much work "somehow" is doing here
irishcoffee 2 hours ago
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?
odvcencio 2 hours ago
yeah the tests live with the implementation code always (Go thing) and the repo root thing is like a preference, main is an acceptable package to put stuff in (Go thing), i see this a lot with smaller projects or library type projects