Difftastic: A diff that understands syntax • Hacker News Board

Re: Difftastic: A diff that understands syntax

#221

Post by Wilfred » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

estebank wrote: post #215

loxias wrote: post #22

This looks really cool and I can't wait to try it, tho... a bit of a PITA to get running. ;) Took a while to figure out how to build, and had to install 400MB of dependencies first.... Edit: And after installing cargo, watching it fail to build, then determining I must need a newer version of cargo, so I built that from source... it fails. Apparently I need to install `rustc-mozilla` and not `rustc`. "obviously". Thi…

Honest question: how did you arrive to the conclusion you needed rustc-mozilla? I would love to make sure whatever flow led you to that is made clearer for other newcomers, because that is definitely not something anyone that isn't working on Firefox should even try.

I imagine it's a misunderstanding with the rustc-hash dependency used in difftastic for faster hashing.

Re: Difftastic: A diff that understands syntax

#222

Post by Wilfred » Wed, Mar 30, 2022, 9:28 PM UTC

eatonphil wrote: post #188

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #6

Is there a good reason why diff tools generally don’t use AST?

What happens when you have an invalid file/AST?

tree-sitter inserts error nodes and gives you an AST for all inputs. It seems to work well in practice.

Re: Difftastic: A diff that understands syntax

#223

Post by infogulch » Thu, Mar 31, 2022, 1:10 AM UTC

vcmiraldo wrote: post #10

I really like the idea of focusing on producing patches for human consumption. I studied the problem of merging AST-level patches during my PhD ( https://github.com/VictorCMiraldo/hdiff ) and can confirm: not simple! :)

How does your work relate to tree-sitter, which also manages patches which it describes as "incremental parsing" as well as error states.

Re: Difftastic: A diff that understands syntax

#224

Post by pinsl » Sat, Apr 02, 2022, 1:32 PM UTC

easrng wrote: post #189

vlunkr wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge part of the appeal of Rust and Go tools is that you can just ship a binary, it's frustrating that it's not available here.

Not sure about Go, but Rust still links against glibc, so I sometimes have to recompile things to make them work on my Debian systems if they're built against newer glibc.

Rust can statically link against musl.

https://doc.rust-lang.org/reference/linkage.html#static-and-...