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by bhl 1803 days ago
That link does go over an optimized tree-diffing algorithm for ASTs, but the question I'm wondering is how to extend incremental parsing into incremental diffing, as opposed to full parse into full diff.
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The short answer is that it's unsolved in general and just done ad-hoc in practice. I'm working on incremental & demand-driven analysis techniques for my PhD research and currently building essentially what you describe. The state-of-the-art is probably this technique from this year's PLDI [1] -- last I heard they were using a batch parser but planning on integrating with tree-sitter at some point. [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3453483.3454052