Panic’s Nova Parser and Grammars
Panic’s Nova Developer Forum: “Now, in my opinion and after laying all to bare in this way, Tree Sitter stands as the best path forward for both Nova’s team as well as our extension developers. Keep in mind, I know little about the actual performance of Tree Sitter against our current parser (both of which are marketed as very fast), and likely won’t until time is taken to actually try. There are more things to consider beyond the raw speed of its C source, as Nova’s features need to sit atop it and bridge to Swift, which may take time to get right. So, that’s all within a grain of salt.”
Panic is full of talented people and I love how transparent they are.
This would, obviously, be a huge change to the guts of Nova and I can see why they’re approaching it so cautiously.
In the end I’m looking forward to final decision and which direction they decide to go with.
Tree Sitter seems like a solid choice, even if it’s not created by Panic and being written in C should make for fast, small, code.
Hopefully the Tree Sitter folks will welcome Panic input and PR’s with open arms so Nova and all other developers benefit.