diffr VS gumtree

I use diffr since, it shows small changes in long lines nicely.

For visualization I really like kdiff3. Or on terminal https://github.com/mookid/diffr with specific settings that use 256 colors the highlights word differences as well.

But for manual merging I haven't found anything better than ediff. That's the only reason I install emacs on my work machines. Seemless integration into a text editor is just unbeatable.

I wrote diffr [0] for that purpose; it serves me well, especially if your team makes code with long lines.

In my opinion, a simple approach that does NOT make any parsing is more efficient (what about bugs in your parser? code with syntax errors? also, how fast would the parser be?)

[0]: https://github.com/mookid/diffr

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.