dyff

Anyone here using semantic diffing tools in their daily work? How good are they? I use some for e.g. YAML [0] and JSON [1], and they're nice [2], but these are comparatively simple languages. I'm particularly curious because just plain diffing ASTs is more on the "syntax-aware diffing" side rather than the "semantic diffing" side, yet most semantic tooling descriptions stop at saying they use ASTs. ASTs are not necessarily in a minimal / optimized form by construction I believe, so I'm pretty sure you'll have situations where a "semantic" differ will report a difference, whereas a compiler would still compile the given translation unit to the same machine bytecode after all the optimization passes during later levels. Not even necessarily for target platform dependent reasons. But maybe this doesn't matter much or would be more confusing

Git is generally insufferable when it comes to these. Diffing YAMLs is even worse, and it gets downright hideous when the specific document you're working with betrays YAML's rules about orderedness (the document is order invariant, while YAML is ordered). In that case, even most semantic diffing tools become unusable. This is a thing with JSON too, arrays are ordered. I've been recently using dyff [0] to diff YAMLs in an order invariant way, and it's been absolutely liberating. Couldn't help with version control, but it's still night and day. [0] https://github.com/homeport/dyff

I thought I’d share a few: - Diffing YAML files: https://github.com/homeport/dyff - Inspecting Docker image layers: https://github.com/wagoodman/dive - Interactive HTTPS proxy: https://mitmproxy.org/

https://github.com/homeport/dyff yet another pretty nice option.

Babashka is another Hy-like alternative, but based on Clojure, and recently discussed on HN: https://github.com/borkdude/babashka https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24353476 Aside: another nice tool I recently discovered for working with JSON and YML, doing conversion and diffs (especially helpful for generated files): https://github.com/homeport/dyff