diff-match-patch VS esbuild

I also came across this diff match algorithms: https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch

Outside of that, to get the diffs there is a library called diff-match-patch that has implementations in most languages. Your data model / state tracking sounds like it matches the internal constraints.

So I'll just leave you with this question - why, as a developer, would I ever advise using this, when fast diff is an industry standard tool that does exactly this, but better, using well tested methods that are being implemented in JS and further optimized by one of the largest global tech companies. Mind you, this is the same company which has developed its own proprietary monolithic VCS, managing versioning for 2billion+ lines of code.

Hello HN!

I was always annoyed by conflicts that can be solved automatically, but still need human intervention. E.g. two people changing the same line, but at different, non-conflicting positions. So I searched for a character based patching library and found this nice article https://neil.fraser.name/writing/patch/ and its corresponding library https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch.

Parsing git conflicts, applying patches and showing some useful diffs in the UI helps me to solve 80% of my conflicts automatically. I hope it can help you too.

Happy Hacking!

A bit late to the party but have you checked this? google/diff-match-patch

Found this, simple and seems interesting: https://github.com/google/diff-match-patch

If you need to know exactly what the diff is, you might want to use something like github.com/google/diff-match-patch. Otherwise, a simple Levenshtein distance would suffice. This library seems to have a whole bunch of string distances implemented. Hope this helps!

Photo by Markus Spiske on Diff.Match.Patch based on Google library.

Using a more raw toolchain is also a good way to speed things up; the SWC website shows it to be 20 to 70 times faster than Babel, and there are tons of speed advantages in complex real-world applications, which proves that rawness can be a big help in speeding things up. Instead of vite-plugin-react, you can use @vitejs/plugin-react-swc, with LightningCSS instead of PostCSS, SWC or esbuild instead of Babel, etc. etc. to achieve better performance.

Babel with 49,577,061 npm downloads per week, is the most used tool for JavaScript transformation, we looked at Esbuild as a replacement but many functionalities, most notably loadable support, are missing. Another alternative SWC, written in Rust, supports all the necessary functionalities we need, and on top of that it has APIs similar to Babel, making migration much smoother than other alternatives:

Added a plugin to exclude vendor sourcemaps from the scripts (big reduction) exclude node_modules from source map Issue #1685 · evanw/esbuild · GitHub

You have to use a bundler such as esbuild which will compile your project and bundle all of it's dependencies along with it so they aren't imported. This bypasses the ESM/CommonJS incompatibility issue.

However, when you want to productionize your JS library, you need to bundle it. Otherwise, you will ship all the node_modules. Is used esbuild because it is able to bundle to CJS and ESM. Now, let's run the same benchmark with the bundled version.

Are you familiar with Java?

If so, a web bundler is like a build tool which creates a single fat jar from all your source code and dependencies, so all you have to "deploy" is a single file... except the fat jar is just a (usually minified) js file (and sometimes other resources like a css output file that is the "bundled" version of multiple input CSS files, and other formats that "compile" to CSS, like SCSS [1] which used to be common because CSS lacked lots of features, like variables for example, but today is not as much needed).

Without a bundler, when you write your application in multiple JS files that use npm dependencies (99.9% of web developers), how do you get the HTML to include links to everything? It's a bit tricky to do by hand, so you get a bundler to take one or more "entry points" and then anything that it refers to gets "bundled" together in a single output file that gets minified and "tree-shaken" (dead code elimination, i.e if you don't use some functions of a lib you imported, those functions are removed from the output).

Bundlers also process the JS code to replace stuff like CommonJS module imports/exports with ESM (the now standard module system that browsers support) and may even translate usages of newer features to code that uses old, less convenient APIs (so that your code runs in older browsers).

I've been learning a lot about this because I am writing a project that is built on top of esbuild[2], a web bundler written in Go (I believe Vite uses it, and Vite is included in the benchmarks in this post). It's extremely fast, so fast I don't know why bother writing something in Rust to go even faster, I get all my code compiled in a few milliseconds with esbuild!

Hope that helps.

[1] https://sass-lang.com/documentation/syntax/

[2] https://esbuild.github.io/

Indeed!

They probably took the idea from https://esbuild.github.io

Go has the benefit of not having to reach a distributed consensus amongst a handful of individual browser vendors. Try compiling a large Go project with tinygo to get a glimpse of that experience [1]. If the browser vendors had been able to ship ES4 or ES5 with module support between 1999 and 2009, Node probably would have implemented it and there would be no dichotomy between CJS and ESM.

[1] https://github.com/evanw/esbuild/issues/1111

Vite is not a bundler but a frontend tool that intelligently uses ESBuild and Rollup for their best use cases.