ast-grep VS diffsitter

This article illustrates the usage of ast-grep, a tool designed to locate and substitute patterns in your codebase, towards easing your migration to React 19.

This looks great, thanks for building and sharing it.

Interested folks may also want to check out ast-grep:

https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep

ast-grep is a command-line tool that lets you search and transform code written in many programming languages using abstract syntax trees (ASTs). ASTs are data structures that capture the syntactic and semantic structure of source code. With ast-grep, you can write patterns as if you are writing ordinary code, and it will match all code that has the same syntactical structure. And if you need more power, you can use YAML, a rule system that allows you to write more sophisticated linting rules or code modifications.

I really like this - it means the tool is available to people with familiarity of any of those four distribution mechanisms.

You can also download pre-built binaries from their releases page: https://github.com/ast-grep/ast-grep/releases/tag/0.14.2

On top of that, they offer API bindings for it in three different languages:

- Rust (not yet stable): https://docs.rs/ast-grep-core/latest/ast_grep_core/

- JavaScript/TypeScript: https://ast-grep.github.io/guide/api-usage/js-api.html

- Python: https://ast-grep.github.io/guide/api-usage/py-api.html

It's rare to see a tool/library offer this depth of language support out of the box.

Is there an open source library that does this? Maybe something on top of ast-grep

Or https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter. I've tried both and I like them. No preference or notable opinions on them yet!

For git diff's I've been using https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter

One more tree-sitter based diffing tool - diffsitter

https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter

Several threads here point to difftastic: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

I know a lot of people who have a lot of hope for diffsitter (or something like it): https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter

Personally, I think the reason most "good" semantic diff tools are proprietary is that they are huge amounts of effort that are mostly "hacks" and "heuristics" bandaged together in ways that people don't want to let out how the sausage was made.

But I also "general, language agnostic AST-based semantic diff" is a mountain peak we cannot reach (probably ever), and I believe my experiments found an interesting local maxima that people are maybe sleeping on (lexer-based diffs rather than parser-based diffs): https://github.com/WorldMaker/tokdiff

https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter there are quiet a few projects such as this one, attempting to solve the issue. :)

There’s an interesting project in the semantic diff/merge space that I have been keeping an eye out for https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter

I have never used any of them, but it look like tree-sitter based diff tools are exactly what you are searching for (like difftastic, gumtree or diffsitter).

I believe Unison is the only attempt to do this at a programming language/environment level.

For Git diffs, there is Diffsitter, which uses Tree Sitter to generate semantic diffs of code files: https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter

I have not used it, but it is high on my todo list.

Looks great, I'll try it! FYI, there is a very similar project called diffsitter https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter