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Comment by Klathmon | Hacker News Reader

It is a small thing, but it throws me off everytime i see it, and then it takes a few seconds of looking around before it dawns on me what happened.

The "user" in me would love a language aware diffing (and merging) system, but the developer in me is already groaning about how much work that would end up taking for arguably not that much benefit.

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Maybe this will help: https://www.semanticmerge.com/

I really like SemanticMerge, it makes total sense, although the diff experience is unlike other diff tools in terms of immediacy. But I think it will be another great tool to add to the arsenal when you need to pull out the big guns on crazy diffs.

Absolutely. I had it installed for some time and mostly thought "this is really neat but I could live without it." And then there was a monster merge with significant conflicts all over the place. I don't think it would have been otherwise possible to pull it off with as little damage as there was if not for this tool.

I really like SemanticMerge, in its current shape it is litte more than a fancy proof of concept.

Its biggest limitation on real projects is that it works on a single-file level, while all the interesting stuff happens on patch level. You may browse their forums to get an idea of what else is missing.

That said, I wish all the best to Codice and I really hope that they continue to invest in this tool.

Looks a lot like Eclipse's semantic diffing. I haven't used Eclipse since 2006, but it was better than anything I have seen since.

I would love to press that "Buy Now" button, but I just can't seem to get past the emboss effect on that CTA.

I think it might be easier to get to a syntax-aware diff if one approached it reusing the language specific syntax highlighting specs used in various editors. I've almost sat down to start that myself a few times.

I don't think it has to be truly language aware. A diff tool that looks for matched braces, quotes, and indents to figure out where the blocks are would do better most of the time.

It doesn't have to be fully language aware, but it has to understand most, if not all, of the syntax. As soon as you start trying to match braces, you need to handle strings, comments, and probably a whole bunch of stuff I'm not thinking of.

Here's an idea: wouldn't it by trivial for <insert your favourite language compiler here> to expose the AST of your code, and solve this problem the easy way?

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