0X0x54MUR41·Jul 13, 2025Submission
GumTree: A syntax-aware diff tool
12 points · Open discussionGumTreeDiff
gumtree
Java2017–2025
GumTreeDiff / gumtree
gumtree
An awesome code differencing tool
7Distinct people
10Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
1.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
An awesome code differencing tool
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year10 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2017-08-25 20:32:47 UTC to 2025-07-13 04:19:24 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
What Hacker News says
10 sourcesIn case anybody happens to be interested in testing `gumtree` with https://github.com/jj-vcs/jj, I think I got them to work together. See https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree/wiki/VCS-Integration#... (assumes Docker).
In Diffsitter – A Tree-sitter based AST difftool to get meaningful semantic diffsIf you're looking for something more complete and actively maintained, check out https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree.
(I evaluated semantic diff tools for use in Brokk but I ultimately went with standard textual diff; the main hangup that I couldn't get past is that semantic diff understandably works very poorly when you have a syntactically invalid file due to an in-progress edit.)
In Diffsitter – A Tree-sitter based AST difftool to get meaningful semantic diffsThere is also gumtree that does ast based diffing https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree
In Difftastic, a structural diff tool that understands syntaxI'm not familiar with Pijul, and haven't finished watching this presentation, but IME the problems with modern version control tools is that they still rely on comparing lines of plain text, something we've been doing for decades. Merge conflicts are an issue because our tools are agnostic about the actual content they're tracking.
Instead, the tools should be smarter and work on the level of functions, classes, packages, sentences, paragraphs, or whatever primitive makes sense for the project and file that is being changed. In the case of code bases, they need to be aware of the language and the AST of the program. For binary files, they need to be aware of the file format and its binary structure. This would allow them to show actually meaningful diffs, and minimize the chances of conflicts, and of producing a corrupt file after an auto
Read the rest
matic merge.
There has been some research in this area, and there are a few semantic diffing tools[1,2,3], but I'm not aware of this being widely used in any VCS.
Nowadays, with all the machine learning advances, the ideal VCS should also use ML to understand the change at a deeper level, and maybe even suggest improvements. If AI can write code for me, it could surely understand what I'm trying to do, and help me so that version control is entirely hands-free, instead of having to fight with it, and be constantly aware of it, as I have to do now.
Or, since it's more than likely that humans won't be writing code or text in the near future, we'll skip the next revolution in VCS tools, and AI will be able to version its own software. /sigh
I just finished watching the presentation, and Pijul seems like an iterative improvement over Git. Nothing jumped out at me like a killer feature that would make me want to give it a try. It might be because the author focuses too much on technical details and fixing Git's shortcomings, instead of taking a step back and rethinking what a modern VCS tool should look like today.
[1]: https://semanticdiff.com/
[2]: https://github.com/trailofbits/graphtage
[3]: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree
The next big thing will be semantic code versioning. I.e. a tool that understands language syntax and can track when a symbol is changed.
There are already experiments in this area[1], but I don't think any are ready for mass adoption yet.
The fact that it's 2022 and we're still working with red/green line-based diffs is absurd. Our tools should be smarter and we shouldn't have to handhold them as much as we do with Git. It wouldn't surprise me if the next big VCS used ML to track code changes and resolve conflicts. I personally can't wait.
[1]: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree
In Why I'm using Fossil SCM instead of other source control systems (2016)Gumtree diff is based on ast: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree
There is some discussion of using Treesitter for parsing, that would potentially open door for many languages: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree/issues/148
In Difftastic: Syntax-aware structured diff toolGumTree does AST level diffing, hypothetically one could build VCS on top of that. That would work for binary files as long as they are parseable to some sort of sensible AST.
https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree
In A New Era for Mechanical CADGumtree: A neat code differencing tool
3 points · Open discussionInteresting problem, and useful for creating semantically meaningful diffs, i.e. using entities of the programming language. A different approach to that is implemented in gumtree [1,2].
[1] Fine-grained and Accurate Source Code Differencing https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01054552/document
[2] https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree
In Designing a Tree Diff Algorithm Using Dynamic Programming and A*