WIP: build: migrate to wasm-based build and add smoke tests

Open svjson opened this issue 2 months ago • 0 comments

WHAT

Migrated node/npm package to wasm-only build
Added separate entrypoints for esm and cjs
Added smoke tests for the npm package, verifying that the grammar can be loaded and used both as ESM module and CommonJS

WHY DROP THE NODE-GYP BUILD?

EDIT: Actually I may have done goofed here - it seems like there IS an ongoing effort: https://github.com/tree-sitter/node-tree-sitter/pull/258

I also linked to the wrong issues below. I'll fix this + watch the situation with the tree-sitter-node situation and revert to the dual gyp/wasm builds if the above PR gets accepted.

The tree-sitter package doesn't support grammars built with tree-sitter >= 0.25 and is no longer being updated to support recent ABI changes.

The upstream maintainers have effectively deprecated native bindings in favor of WebAssembly builds (web-tree-sitter), which are portable, easier to distribute, and doesn’t require native compilation or prebuild infrastructure.

As of Tree-sitter 0.25, grammars generated by the official CLI are ABI-incompatible with the older Node C API used by node-tree-sitter a k a tree-sitter

I initially fiddled with separate builds and packages, tree-sitter-cmake-wasm and tree-sitter-cmake-gyp but abandoned this as there is no tree-sitter release capable of loading the native grammar, rendering a gyp build effectively useless.

WHAT'S NOT INCLUDED?

Github Actions Workflows have not been updated to build, test or publish the npm artifact yet. This will be a separate PR.
The binding test in bindings/node still works as parser.setLanguage(...) doesn't validate the grammar. The errors due to incompatibility does not show up until a parsed Tree object is interacted with. As far as I know, bindings/node no longer serves a purpose, but I'm not familiar enough with the setup and workings of tree-sitter grammar projects to be bold enough to go ahead and delete it. Yet.

Oct 11 '25 23:10 svjson