awesome-structure-editors VS gumtree

Yes, I think that we can do better than plain text as the source of truth, and thus git would probably need to change.

There's work around a bunch of languages that are not based on text, some have their own editor or a tool to manage a canonical representation in text for you that would make them friendlier to git.

  - https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/main/README.md

There's many more akin projects listed in https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/ma...

I can't wait fast enough for these ideas to reshape how we deal with programs and build stuff.

Haskell seems to be pretty big. For example in this list of projects it appears to be the second most popular language (after TypeScript) :)

See https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors

You could submit a pull request to get it added to awesome-structure-editors by /u/yairchu

It would be interesting to have such a general project go somewhere.

While in principle structural editing sounds like an incredible advance, there are 'good enough' advantages to plain-text tools that make it a much more practical solution. The other issue is of course integration with existing tooling, which you either skip entirely or compromise on the design.

What I feel is missing, between the description of "old, bad state of things" and "utopian vision" is a review of some of the projects that already tried to achieve this ideal state. It turns out there are a number of them, and most of them failed to achieve any traction or impact [0].

The rants are very long, so I skimmed quickly the one about git; I understand the complaints, although git is only bringing me joy and no pain --interactive rebase, absorb and a few aliases made it a breeze. But in a similar fashion there are projects trying to solve its fundamental issues, like pijul(.org); what are they missing?

[0] https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/ma...

Some good ones pops up in Projectional Programming [1] once in a while. The pinned thread links to the structure-editors github list [2] too.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/nosyntax/

[2] https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors

I'm not familiar with Pijul, and haven't finished watching this presentation, but IME the problems with modern version control tools is that they still rely on comparing lines of plain text, something we've been doing for decades. Merge conflicts are an issue because our tools are agnostic about the actual content they're tracking.

Instead, the tools should be smarter and work on the level of functions, classes, packages, sentences, paragraphs, or whatever primitive makes sense for the project and file that is being changed. In the case of code bases, they need to be aware of the language and the AST of the program. For binary files, they need to be aware of the file format and its binary structure. This would allow them to show actually meaningful diffs, and minimize the chances of conflicts, and of producing a corrupt file after an automatic merge.

There has been some research in this area, and there are a few semantic diffing tools[1,2,3], but I'm not aware of this being widely used in any VCS.

Nowadays, with all the machine learning advances, the ideal VCS should also use ML to understand the change at a deeper level, and maybe even suggest improvements. If AI can write code for me, it could surely understand what I'm trying to do, and help me so that version control is entirely hands-free, instead of having to fight with it, and be constantly aware of it, as I have to do now.

I just finished watching the presentation, and Pijul seems like an iterative improvement over Git. Nothing jumped out at me like a killer feature that would make me want to give it a try. It might be because the author focuses too much on technical details, instead of taking a step back and rethinking what a modern VCS tool should look like today.

[1]: https://semanticdiff.com/

[2]: https://github.com/trailofbits/graphtage

[3]: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree

There’s also gumtree: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree/wiki/Languages

GumTree does AST level diffing, hypothetically one could build VCS on top of that. That would work for binary files as long as they are parseable to some sort of sensible AST.

https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree

There are a few AST-based diffing programs e.g. GumTreeDiff. I haven't tried any of them though.