Gels

Trait-based grammar inference engine targeting tree-sitter output.

Status: Sketch ○

Initial crate structure with type definitions and trait interfaces. No detection or synthesis logic yet.

Gels detects syntactic traits from example source files, identifies known languages, or synthesizes tree-sitter grammars for unknown ones.

Key ideas

• Trait-based detection — Syntactic features (brace-delimited, semicolon-terminated, pattern matching, etc.) are independent detectors
• Grammar synthesis — Detected traits contribute grammar fragments that merge into a complete tree-sitter grammar
• Language identification — Match trait vectors against known language profiles

Pipeline

examples → tokenize → detect traits → identify or synthesize → tree-sitter grammar

Crates

Crate	Description
gels	CLI binary and public library API
gels-core	Token types, SyntaxTrait trait, grammar IR, language profiles
gels-traits	Language-agnostic tokenizer, built-in trait detectors, known language registry
gels-synth	Grammar fragment merging and tree-sitter grammar.js emission

CLI

gels analyze <dir>              # detect traits, identify or synthesize grammar
gels identify <dir>             # identify the language
gels emit <dir> -o grammar.js   # output tree-sitter grammar

Links

• GitHub