5 ms·
Line-level diffs didn't even make sense when humans wrote every line. It's just combining two different things—text-based files and formal languages—in ways tha
by throwaway27448 8mo ago
Line-level diffs didn't even make sense when humans wrote every line. It's just combining two different things—text-based files and formal languages—in ways that were never going to make sense. We've all wasted days of our lives fixing crappy diffs because nobody bothered to develop something that made sense for the files we were tracking outside of "everything is text who cares text is magic"
Still, some languages/heuristics handle this better than others.
- rs545837 8mo agoExactly. The only reason line-level diffs survived this long is that text is the lowest common denominator. Once you have fast enough parsers (tree-sitter parses most files in under 1ms), there's no reason to stay at the line level.