tree-sitter

Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 6 years (2021–2026), in 12 threads.

People raised many different problems with tree-sitter, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 13 complaints

Writing a grammar for a custom DSL is a big barrier, requiring recompiles on each iteration2026-04-18
Variable binding syntax is counterintuitive and underdocumented, unlike normal pattern languages2024-09-28
Must hand-write string-keyed recursive descent code with no compile-time checks2024-09-02
Problems are hard to fix and their causes are hard to figure out2024-03-20
GLR failures happen inexplicably and are essentially impossible to debug2024-03-20
Writing a parser with it is complicated enough that people give up and write their own2024-02-19
Docs are hard to learn from, forcing reliance on copying others' examples2023-05-29
Producing an AST from Tree-sitter is a huge pain; error messages hard to customize2023-05-20
Questions whether the tree-sitter parser library is hard to use in practice2022-10-27
Grammar system is confusing compared to parser combinators2022-07-10
Parser error messages are nearly content-free, just showing "(error)"2022-01-28
Editor freezes on large files and crashes during autocompletion2021-08-17
Very hard to use and implement into an editor; hard to figure out how to use2021-07-18