Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff tool

• difftastic

  68 19,530 9.9 Rust

  a structural diff that understands syntax 🟥🟩

Wow, thank you for the pointer! I've added it to https://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/wiki/Structural-Diffs as I'm trying to understand the other solutions in this space.

Difftastic does not create a patch or worry about merging. That's a hard problem that I'm not trying to solve. Instead, it builds two ASTs, then marks each node as unchanged or novel.

To compute the diff, I use a graph search. Each vertex represents a position in both the left and right ASTs.

Suppose you're comparing A with X A.

Start node:

  Left: A   Right: X A

• diffr

  3 519 5.7 Rust

  Yet another diff highlighting tool

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

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• gumtree

  6 857 8.1 Java

  An awesome code differencing tool

  

• locust

  4 47 0.0 Python

  "git diff" over abstract syntax trees (by bugout-dev)

  

• delta

  88 20,717 8.1 Rust

  A syntax-highlighting pager for git, diff, and grep output

Thanks, this is good advice. There are some super featureful diff tools out there. For example, https://github.com/dandavison/delta does a line-based diff but it also syntax highlights its output.

I'm hoping that defining syntax in a separate TOML file will let end users extend difftastic for their own languages/config files. I want to keep difftastic small and manageable.

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