alt Hacker NewsMaybe that explains why I was confused about this article. I kept wondering what exactly on offer, and that it couldn't be as simple as help on hover and auto-complete, because those seemed pretty basic and prevalent. It took me a few years to move to RStudio, but at this point, I literally don't know anyone who doesn't use it. To the point that I once had to explain to a labmate that R and RStudio were, in fact, not the same thing.
So either this is not that exciting, or else the additional things that are on offer are not very clearly explained to the point that I missed them.
I suspect the main benefits are portability (since tree-sitter uses wasm and javascript it can run in any webpage - compared to the previous way of parsing R code which needed an R runtime, so not just any old website could do it; e.g. a shiny app probably could because it has an R runtime available but a standard HTML page couldn't). And the other is tree-sitter is a widely used tool so now anything that uses tree-sitter can now work with R, since the R grammar is available.
Looks like R's tree-sitter grammar has been in use for GitHub search for a while (since 2024), so it's a nice improvement due to R/tree-sitter, although we've probably been benefitting from it for a while already, perhaps without knowing exactly how it worked!
https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/120397#discuss...