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The ESS package in Emacs has also had several of these features for R for a long time. The difference here is portability and generality. Tree-sitter is a partial solution to the n×m problem, and now R has been invited to participate in that solution.

(The n×m problem is that for n languages and m tools like autoformatting, etc., we need an implementation for each tool specific to each language. With tree-sitter, we get n+m implementations instead: generic tools that work across multiple languages.)

by stephbook2 hours ago|

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What if you want to share something outside of your precious IDE?

- Merge request on GitHub - Presentation with reveal.js (kind of like PowerPoint)

You'd be stuck with either bland, uncoloured, text-only characters, OR with a fuzzy PNG screenshot where you can't zoom or copy. Or maybe you "parse R" with Regex.

tree-sitter integrates into any web-based technology, allowing you to _share_ code.

by nomilk1 hours ago|

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Yes, your comment really should be the focus of article, i.e. genuinely new capabilities and improvements, not existing capabilities done a slightly different way. In any case it’s a minor nitpick and it’s awesome progress for the language and tooling

by MostlyStable6 hours ago|

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Maybe 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.

by nomilk6 hours ago|

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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...

by user39393824 hours ago|

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I believe this should let you do syntax highlighting for R in vim for example.