[difflens]

> as I see it is that it provides a uniform api for traversing a parse tree, which makes it relatively straightforward to onboard a new language to a tool with tree-sitter support. The problem though is that the tree-sitter grammar is nearly always going to be an approximation to the actual language grammar, unless the language compiler/interpreter uses tree-sitter for parsing.

Author of DiffLens (https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=DiffLens...) here. A uniform API for traversing a parse tree for all languages would be amazing for DiffLens! However, I fear languages are different enough that this ideal may never be reached :) Or maybe there would be a core set of APIs and extensions for the idiosyncrasies of each language. For DiffLens though, we try to use the language's official parser/compiler if it exposes an AST

[b3morales]

I think your skepticism is justified, but there are two tools that I have seen that use tree-sitter for diffing:

https://github.com/wilfred/difftastic

https://github.com/afnanenayet/diffsitter

(I have not tried either personally.)