Crate Reference

Status: Current Last modified: 2026-06-15 15:00 EDT

Summary of the main crates and packages in TalkBank/chatter.

Foundational crates

tree-sitter-talkbank

Rust binding crate for the generated TalkBank CHAT tree-sitter grammar. Exposes LANGUAGE, NODE_TYPES, and the generated query constants used by editor and parser integrations.

talkbank-model

The typed data model for CHAT files. Defines ChatFile, Utterance, DependentTier, MorTier, GraTier, and all other AST types. Includes validation logic, the WriteChat trait for CHAT serialization, serde support for JSON, and JsonSchema derivations. Also owns error types (ParseError, ErrorSink trait, Span, SourceLocation), diagnostic infrastructure, and ParseValidateOptions. Provides a closure-based content walker (walk_words / walk_words_mut) that centralizes recursive traversal of UtteranceContent and BracketedItem with domain-aware group gating.

talkbank-derive

Procedural macros for the model crate (SemanticEq, SemanticDiff, SpanShift, ValidationTagged, and the error_code_enum macro).

talkbank-cache

SQLite-backed validation and roundtrip cache used by higher-level validation and corpus workflows.

talkbank-parser

The canonical parser. Wraps the tree-sitter C parser and converts the concrete syntax tree (CST) into ChatFile model types. Provides error recovery via tree-sitter’s GLR algorithm and is the parser used by the CLI, LSP, transform pipelines, and editor tooling.

talkbank-parser-re2c

Independent alternate parser used as an equivalence oracle against the tree-sitter parser. Primarily a testing and spec-hardening tool rather than a first-wave end-user surface.

talkbank-transform

High-level pipelines: parse+validate, CHAT-to-JSON, JSON-to-CHAT, normalization. Integrates the validation cache, JSON schema validation, and parallel directory validation.

Application and integration surfaces

chatter

The chatter CLI binary: validate, normalize, to-json, and corpus management.

talkbank-lsp

Language Server Protocol server with tree-sitter incremental parsing, real-time diagnostics, and semantic highlighting.

send2clan

Rust bindings for sending files to the CLAN application (macOS Apple Events, Windows WM_APP). The crate exposes the safe send2clan API directly while keeping the raw FFI in private modules.

chatter-desktop

Desktop validation app (Tauri v2, React). Mandates TUI parity with the CLI.

Test and spec-support crates

talkbank-parser-tests

Parser tests. Runs the parser over the reference corpus and validates the results. Also owns spec-generated tests, roundtrip tests, equivalence tests, and property tests.

spec/tools

Generator binaries for tree-sitter corpus tests, generated Rust tests, shared spec artifacts, and error documentation.

spec/runtime-tools

Runtime-aware spec tooling for validation, bootstrap, and corpus-mining tasks that should not live in the root Rust workspace.