index.md

title
Introduction

Introduction

Tree-sitter is a parser generator tool and an incremental parsing library. It can build a concrete syntax tree for a source file and efficiently update the syntax tree as the source file is edited. Tree-sitter aims to be:

• General enough to parse any programming language
• Fast enough to parse on every keystroke in a text editor
• Robust enough to provide useful results even in the presence of syntax errors
• Dependency-free so that the runtime library (which is written in pure C) can be embedded in any application

Language Bindings

There are currently bindings that allow Tree-sitter to be used from the following languages:

Official

• C#
• Go
• Haskell
• Java (JDK 22)
• JavaScript (Node.js)
• JavaScript (Wasm)
• Kotlin
• Python
• Rust

Third-party

• Delphi
• ELisp
• Go
• Guile
• Java (Android)
• Java (JDK 8+)
• Java (JDK 11+)
• Julia
• Lua
• Lua
• OCaml
• Odin
• Perl
• R
• Ruby
• Swift

Parsers

A list of known parsers can be found in the wiki.

Talks on Tree-sitter

• Strange Loop 2018
• FOSDEM 2018
• GitHub Universe 2017

Underlying Research

The design of Tree-sitter was greatly influenced by the following research papers:

• Practical Algorithms for Incremental Software Development Environments
• Context Aware Scanning for Parsing Extensible Languages
• Efficient and Flexible Incremental Parsing
• Incremental Analysis of Real Programming Languages
• Error Detection and Recovery in LR Parsers
• Error Recovery for LR Parsers