Difftastic

Difftastic is an advanced structural diff tool designed to understand and compare files based on their syntax. Unlike traditional diff tools that focus on textual differences, Difftastic parses the code to recognize meaningful changes, such as nested structures, alignment of lines, and insignificant whitespace variations. It supports over 30 programming languages, ensuring accurate comparisons even when the textual content differs.

The tool excels in highlighting syntactic changes, making it particularly useful for developers reviewing code changes. Difftastic can also handle merge conflicts by identifying conflicting sections and comparing them.

However, Difftastic is not designed for generating patches or merging Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs), as these tasks are complex and beyond its scope. It also does not ignore the order of elements, which can be significant in certain data structures.

Despite its powerful features, Difftastic has known limitations, such as performance issues with large files and a side-by-side display that may sometimes be confusing. It also requires substantial memory for processing extensive changes.

Difftastic is open-source, licensed under the MIT license, and can be integrated with version control systems like Git and Mercurial. For those using terminal themes like Solarized, adjustments may be needed to display colors correctly. The tool leverages Dijkstra's algorithm for structural diffing, treating it as a graph problem to efficiently identify changes.