Better GitHub Code Search for R with tree-sitter-r

[DavisVaughan]

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Hi GitHub Code Search team!

I'm an employee of Posit, best known for RStudio and our collection of R packages like dplyr, tidyr, and the rest of the tidyverse.

We'd really love to see improved code search for R, like how in these two C examples:

• You can click on a function call and it will tell you the definition site within the project
• You can search for a function name and it will bring up the definition site within the project

We've written a tree-sitter grammar that we are pretty happy with. It's current at the next branch but that will be moving to main soon. https://github.com/r-lib/tree-sitter-r/tree/next

I imagine I probably need to write a tags.scm for you guys? i.e. https://tree-sitter.github.io/tree-sitter/code-navigation-systems. We do have highlights.scm already.

Is there anything else you need? Once we have tags.scm, what next?

And in general I'm curious about the process of how things are kept up to date. Like, if we make an update or improvement in tree-sitter-r, how could that flow into your Code Search? Would we manually ping you about it to get things synced up?

I've seen https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/10934 by @dcreager and @colinwm, are there any other community guides that have been developed since then?

Thanks in advance!

[look]

@DavisVaughan thanks for the suggestion. We'd be happy to add code navigation support for R. You are correct that having a tags.scm will make this much easier for us. Once that is done and the code is in your mainline, please let us know. The next step for us is to take your tags.scm and adapt it to our system (our pipeline requires certain names for the language elements returned by the query). Then the next time we rebuild our code search index, R symbols will be included.