feznyng

Most of the time they rely on their own hand-rolled recursive descent parser. Writing these isn't necessarily hard but time-consuming and tedious especially if you're parsing a large language like C++.

Parser generators like yacc, bison, chumsky, ANTLR etc. can generate a parser for you given a grammar. However these parsers usually don't have the best performance or error reporting characteristics because they are auto-generated. A recursive descent parser is usually faster and because you can customize syntax error messages, easier for an LSP to use to provide good diagnostics.

Tree-sitter is also a parser generator but has better error tolerance properties (not quite as good as hand-written but generally better than prior implementations). Additionally, its incremental meaning it can reuse prior parses to more efficiently create a new AST. Most hand-written parsers are not incremental but are usually still fast enough to be usable in LSPs.

To use tree-sitter you define a grammar in JavaScript that tree-sitter will use to generate a parser in C which you can then use a dynamic or static library in your application.

In your case, this is useful because you can compile down those C libraries to WASM which can run right in the browser and will usually be faster than pure JS (the one catch is serialization overhead between JS and WASM). The problem is that you still need to implement all the language analysis features on top.