Tree-sitter-vhdl

A VHDL parser for syntax highlighting.

References

• VHDL-2000
• VHDL-2008
• VHDL-2019
• VHDL Packages
• VHDL Library Files (search for "1076")
• VSCode Modern VHDL

Screenshots

Neovim, using nvim-treesitter and a Catppuccin colour scheme:

History

This version started off as a fork of alemuller/tree-sitter-vhdl, but ended up as a complete rewrite of the parser and highlighting scripts. It has very little in common with the original.

Limitations

This parser uses a simplified grammar, because the full formal grammar in the VHDL standard is highly ambiguous without compiling the entire code-base into a symbol table. In many cases, invalid syntax will parse into a valid tree.

For the same reason, there might be cases where valid syntax does not map to a valid tree. In this case, please log a bug report.

In addition, the following features are not implemented, and are considered outside the scope of this project.

• IEEE Property Specification Language
• VHDL Procedural Interface

Neovim Setup Process

This parser has been merged into the official nvim-treesitter, so it should work out of the box after adding it to the list of languages to install.

You can also use tree-sitter-manager instead, in which case it is recommended to configure as follows:

require("tree-sitter-manager").setup({
    ensure_installed = {
        -- ...
        'vhdl',
        -- ...
    },
    languages = {
        vhdl = {
            install_info = {
                url      = 'https://github.com/jpt13653903/tree-sitter-vhdl',
                revision = 'master',
                queries  = 'queries/Neovim',
                use_repo_queries = true,
            },
        },
    },
})

Helix Setup Process

This parser has been merged into the official Helix repo, so it should work out of the box.

Building

• Follow the instructions here to setup your development environment.
• Run npm install --save-dev tree-sitter-cli
• Add node_modules/.bin to your environment path
• From within the autogen directory, run py gen_token_trie.py (only required after updating the token lists within autogen)
• Run tree-sitter generate
• Run tree-sitter test

Contributing

Contributions are welcome. Read Contributing.md for more information.