difftastic
gumtree
difftastic | gumtree | |
---|---|---|
68 | 6 | |
19,575 | 861 | |
- | 1.3% | |
9.9 | 8.2 | |
8 days ago | 16 days ago | |
Rust | Java | |
MIT License | GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0 only |
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.
difftastic
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Linus Torvalds adds arbitrary tabs to kernel code
i want a diff tool that shows me exactly which tokens have changed, and which haven't, regardless of how they are laid out.
These already exist: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic
when we get that, then we should get even less merge conflicts.
Counterintuitively, that is not the case. AST-merge is a much, much, much, much, much harder problem than AST-diff.
https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic?tab=readme-ov-file#can...
The fact that diffs can be used to drive a 3-way merge is in fact an accidental property that arises due to the sheer crudeness of the diff format. As soon as you start using more-sophisticated diff formats, solutions to "the diff problem" no longer lead directly to solutions to "the merge problem".
- FLaNK AI Weekly 25 March 2025
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Difftastic, a structural diff tool that understands syntax
Yes there is an `—-override` option you can use to specify the language in which a file should be parsed.
https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/blob/master/CHANGELOG....
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So You Think You Know Git – Git Tips and Tricks by Scott Chacon
Use the fantastic difftastic instead of git's diff. https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/
[alias]
- Difftastic: A structural diff tool that understands syntax
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SemanticDiff now supports Rust
difftastic provides similar capabilities in a free tool based on treesitter
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My programming language aware diff for VS Code and GitHub now supports Rust
difftastic? https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic
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Prettier $20k Bounty was Claimed
If you're looking for a VS Code extension or a GitHub app, check out https://semanticdiff.com/. I'm a co-founder of this project.
If you prefer a CLI tool, check out https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic. It supports more languages, but doesn't recognize when code has been replaced by an equivalent version ("invariances"). So it will show some changes (e.g. replacing a character in a string with an escape sequence) even though they are technically equivalent.
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Pijul: Version-Control Post-Git • Goto 2023
Shameless plug: I've written difftastic[1], a tool that builds ASTs and then does a structural diff of them. You can use it with git too.
It's an incredibly hard problem though, both from a computational complexity point of view, and trying to build a comprehensible UI once you've done the structural AST diff.
[1]: https://github.com/wilfred/difftastic
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Always leave a trailing comma in Python lists, dicts, tuples
There is a diff tool called difftastic: https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic
The idea is that it does not show diff based on text change, but on syntastic meaning. For that, it uses tree-sitter.
I think it still shows the trailing comma in the situation as shown in the article, but it's quite different experience than the standard text based diff.
gumtree
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Pijul: Version-Control Post-Git • Goto 2023
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
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We should format code on demand
There’s also gumtree: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree/wiki/Languages
- Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff tool
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A New Era for Mechanical CAD
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
- Gumtree: A neat code differencing tool
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What comes after Git? It's been 15 years since it was created. SVN was created 5 years before Git. CVS was 15 years before SVN
There are a few AST-based diffing programs e.g. GumTreeDiff. I haven't tried any of them though.
What are some alternatives?
delta - A syntax-highlighting pager for git, diff, and grep output
locust - "git diff" over abstract syntax trees
diffsitter - A tree-sitter based AST difftool to get meaningful semantic diffs
git-bug - Distributed, offline-first bug tracker embedded in git, with bridges
neogit - An interactive and powerful Git interface for Neovim, inspired by Magit
diffr - Yet another diff highlighting tool
Visual Studio Code - Visual Studio Code
apheleia - 🌷 Run code formatter on buffer contents without moving point, using RCS patches and dynamic programming.
tree-sitter-cpp - C++ grammar for tree-sitter
git-imerge - Incremental merge for git
git-split-diffs - Syntax highlighted side-by-side diffs in your terminal
mergify - Merge git changes on commit at a time.