lsif-go VS difftastic

curl -L https://github.com/sourcegraph/lsif-go/releases/download/v1.9.3/src_linux_amd64 -o /usr/local/bin/lsif-go chmod +x /usr/local/bin/lsif-go lsif-go -v

Very nice. For those interested, you can get similar information using SourceGraph and LSIF in a standardized, language agnostic form: https://lsif.dev/. It still generally requires build information for each project/language, unfortunately.

Doing it as a comment would be pretty awful. But anyway I guess the author is looking for https://lsif.dev/

If you want an example of using go compiler frontend for static analysis, checkout https://github.com/sourcegraph/lsif-go, this powers our precise code navigation indexing for Go and solves your issue of not having type information when using tree-sitter (the code is a bit hard to follow because a lot of work went into making it as fast as possible, but feel free to find your way to our Discord where we could answer questions). Dont try to reimplement type checking, its all there waiting to be used ; )

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".

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....

Use the fantastic difftastic instead of git's diff. https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/

  [alias]

difftastic provides similar capabilities in a free tool based on treesitter

difftastic? https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic

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 It supports more languages, but doesn't recognize when code has been replaced by an equivalent version ("invariances").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.

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

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.