Re:Will LLMs Eclipse the Classic Code Diff Algorithms?
by baristaGeek on Thursday November 09, 2023 @04:08PM
(#38211336)
Huge fan of SemanticDiff!
We still see this technology being able to handle edge cases (as you mention) such as certain movements of blocks of code to another file.
I think a system that parses the code and uses verifiable rules to hide invariant changes would have a much easier time being adopted. I may be biased since I work on SemanticDiff (think difftastic but for VS Code and GitHub) and have implemented such rules myself. There have been several times where I've thought about implementing a new rule, only to find out that some obscure edge case would not be handled correctly. So I don't see how LLMs could handle these cases correctly in the near future.