useR! 2024

tree-sitter is an efficient incremental parsing library that builds concrete syntax trees from source files, and is fast enough to update those trees on every keystroke. A syntax tree is a powerful tool that can serve as the basis for many IDE features, such as goto definition, syntax highlighting, code diagnostics, and code formatting. One of tree-sitter's biggest selling points is that it is general enough to parse any programming language through language specific "grammars". In this talk, we'll discuss the R grammar that we've built for tree-sitter, along with a companion R package that exposes bindings for tree-sitter itself. We'll look at how the grammar can be utilized in IDEs and R packages to empower developers with tooling that aids in writing, reading, and debugging their code, and how the companion package allows you to parse code for any language directly from the comfort of R.