Show HN: I ported Tree-sitter to Go
150 points - today at 6:28 PM
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!
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
today at 10:06 PM
would also be nice to have this support gopackagesdriver backend
odvcencio
today at 7:12 PM
thanks so much for the note! i really appreciate it. i built this precisely for folks like yourself with this specific pain, thanks again!
Wouldn't `got` be confused with OpenBSD's Got: https://gameoftrees.org/index.html
odvcencio
today at 7:11 PM
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
today at 7:52 PM
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".
Imustaskforhelp
today at 7:51 PM
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.
YAGOT (Yet Another GOT)
Probably taken already, better use YAGOT-NG (Next Generation) just to be safe.
himata4113
today at 8:03 PM
might be taken too so just YAGOT2 would work
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
today at 8:31 PM
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
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
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
today at 8:26 PM
thank you for the kind words! Very cool project! Very happy you can find some utility in it
Claude attempted a treesitter to go port
Better title
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.
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?
1. Just saying, strange coincidence
2. How can we compare Claude's output in a different language?
3. Detecting break-ins and handling evil-maids: unless the trick is already known on the internets, I do not disclose. Odds are not in my favor.
4. Maybe worth, maybe not. I have my adaptations. Trying to make it not worthy of stealing, in fact.
Also, evil maids, what?
I can't speak for the specificity of parent's "evil maids" phrase but the concept of an "Evil maid" is used in security scenarios.
A maid tends to be an example of a person who's mostly a stranger, but is given unmonitored access to your most private spaces for prolonged periods of time. So they theoretically become a good vector for a malicious actor to say "hey I'll give you $$ if you just plug in this USB drive in his bedroom laptop next time you're cleaning his house" - it's often used in the scenario of "ok what if someone has physical access to your resource for a prolonged period of time without you noticing? what are your protections there?"
I wonder if that's what OP meant? :-)
Ah right, thanks! But it seems OP meant literal evil maids. Which I guess count as the figurative kind too.
"Evil maids" (example): I put my laptop into a safe, seal the safe, seal the room, go to breakfast. On return, I see there was cleaning (not the usual time, I know the hotel), the cleaner looks strangely confused, the seal on the safe is detached (that is often done by applying ice; adhesive hardens, seal goes off). This level of paranoia was not my norm. Had to learn these tricks cause problems happened (repeatedly). In fact, I frequented that hotel, knew customs and the staff, so noticed irregularities.
thebackup
today at 9:31 PM
This was my first thought as well, just from reading the title.
How is OP using Claude relevant?
OK for prototyping. Not OK for prod use if noone actually read it line by line.
odvcencio
today at 8:33 PM
ii am trying to not take issue with this comment because im aware of the huge stigma around ai generated code.
i needed this project so i made it for my use case and had to build on top of it. the only way to ensure quality is to read it all line by line.
if you give me code that you yourself have not reviewed i will not review it for you.
That ship has sailed, man…
No it has not - if it had, there'd be no need to shout down folk who disagree.
Not everyone buys into the inevitabilism. Why should I read code "author" didn't bother to write?
Sorry but these are just not accurate as blanket statements anymore, given how good the models have gotten.
As other similar projects have pointed out, if you have a good test suite and a way for the model to validate its correctness, you can get very good results. And you can continue to iterate, optimize, code review, etc.
Because the entire README doesn't even mention it, and it is an important factor in deciding whether it is ready for production use.
I, for one, am definitely not going to use this project for anything serious unless I have thoroughly reviewed the code myself. Prototyping is fine.
People should say what models/tools they used in even show the prompts.
up2isomorphism
today at 9:34 PM
Because OP obviously downplayed this important fact, which typically shows lower quality/less tested code.
DeepYogurt
today at 8:23 PM
maintenance burden
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
today at 8:20 PM
well how did it do?
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.
Shouldn't you be able to answer that?
odvcencio
today at 8:24 PM
yes and if you clicked the links you would know that i did answer it in the readme.
mathfailure
today at 8:36 PM
But how do we know the readme isn't also vibecoded?
do_not_redeem
today at 8:32 PM
> Pure-Go tree-sitter runtime — no CGo, no C toolchain, WASM-ready.
No you didn't. The readme is obvious LLM slop. Em-dash, rule of three, "not x, y". Why should anyone spend effort reading something you couldn't be bothered to write? Why did you post it to HN from a burner account?
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
today at 7:51 PM
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
I think I understand the situation.
odvcencio
today at 7:54 PM
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
today at 7:59 PM
use four spaces " " in front of a line for <pre> formatting
like " this"
It's 2 or more spaces, not four
conartist6
today at 8:03 PM
It looks like porting the custom C lexers is a big part of the trouble you had to go to do this.
odvcencio
today at 8:09 PM
yes basically about 70% of the engineering effort was spent porting the external scanners and ensuring parity with original (C) tree-sitter
jbreckmckye
today at 8:00 PM
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
today at 8:06 PM
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
today at 8:08 PM
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
today at 8:10 PM
re: up to date grammars, yes i found the official grammars in use by the original tree-sitter library today
How about making 'got' compatible with git repos like jujutsu? It would be a lot easier to try out.
odvcencio
today at 7:53 PM
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
today at 9:31 PM
"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
today at 10:04 PM
i really appreciated this comment the most because of how much work "somehow" is doing here
irishcoffee
today at 7:54 PM
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
today at 7:58 PM
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