Estreecompatible

Estreecompatible is an adjective used to describe software artifacts—parsers, transformers, formatters, and data structures—that produce or consume abstract syntax trees (ASTs) in the ESTree format. ESTree is a community-driven standard for representing JavaScript syntax trees. It defines the shape of AST nodes, including node types such as Program, ExpressionStatement, Identifier, Literal, FunctionDeclaration, and many others, along with optional metadata fields like loc for source location and range.

Being ESTree-compatible means adhering to the ESTree specification, ensuring that produced ASTs use the same node types and property names so that tools built around ESTree can process them without conversion. In practice, ESTree-compatible implementations include popular parsers such as Esprima and Acorn, as well as tooling like Babel, ESLint, and various code-analysis utilities. Some projects may add nonstandard fields for tooling optimization or source maps, but they maintain ESTree compatibility if the core structure remains intact and the AST can be traversed with standard ESTree-aware visitors.

The term helps developers select parsers and tools that interoperate in the JavaScript ecosystem, reducing the need for AST reconciliation when switching between components. It also underpins the compatibility guarantees of many linting, transformation, and analysis workflows that rely on a common AST representation. See also ESTree, Esprima, Acorn, Babel, ESLint.