Explainer: Tree-sitter vs. LSP

I got asked a good question today: what is the difference between Tree-sitter and a language server? I don’t understand how either of these tools work in depth, so I’m just going to explain from an observable, pragmatic point of view. Tree-sitter # Tree-sitter is a parser generator. What this means is that you can hand Tree-sitter a description for a programming language and it will create a program that will parse that language for you. What’s special about Tree-sitter is that it is a.) fast, and b.) can tolerate syntax errors in the input. These two properties make Tree-sitter ideal for creating syntax highlighting engines in text editors. When you’re editing a program, most of the time the program will be in a syntactically invalid state. During that time, you don’t want your colors changing or just outright breaking while you’re typing. Naïve regex-based syntax highlighters frequently suffer from this issue. Tree-sitter also provides a query language where you can make queries…