[cfe-dev] clang based diff tool

[Maurizio Vitale]

Thanks, I think this is the thread I remembered.
Although I must be getting old faster than I'd like: in my mind it was
further back in the past.

On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 5:41 AM, Laszlo Nagy <rizsotto.mailinglist at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Maurizio, what you mentioned remind me about this discussion...
>
>   http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/pipermail/cfe-dev/2014-February/035129.html
>
> regards,
> Laszlo
>
> On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 5:40 PM, Marshall Clow <mclow.lists at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Oct 4, 2014, at 2:37 AM, David Chisnall <David.Chisnall at cl.cam.ac.uk>
>> wrote:
>> > On 3 Oct 2014, at 17:32, Maurizio Vitale <mrz.vtl at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >
>> >> G'day everybody,
>> >>  I vaguely remember that there was some tought/work on having a
>> semantics-based diff tool on top of clang. Did I dream of this? any
>> pointers to the discussion?
>> >>
>> >> Maurizio
>> >
>> > One of my students worked on a project to do this using libclang and
>> the Python bindings last year.  His goal was to identify common
>> refactorings and present them in a human-readable form (including things
>> like 'Variable x was renamed y in every use except those in foo.c').  His
>> code probably isn't in a very good state to be reusable, but I'm sure he'd
>> be happy to share his experiences with you.
>>
>> I’d love to see someone pursue this.
>> There’s lots of things that one could build upon a smart diff tool.
>>
>> Finding similar chunks of code.
>> Detecting botched refactoring.
>> Etc. Etc.
>>
>>
>> Rambling to follow …
>>
>> A long time ago, I worked on a horrible code base; the result of years of
>> copy/paste development.
>> We had a tool called (I think) Pattern Insight that found these two
>> chunks of code (actual duplicated code was about 60 lines long)
>>
>> blah blah global1 blah blah
>> blah blah blah blah blah
>> blah blah blah blah global1
>> blah global1 blah global1 blah blah
>> global1 blah blah blah blah
>> blah blah global1 blah blah
>>
>> — and —
>>
>> blah blah global2 blah blah
>> blah blah blah blah blah
>> blah blah blah blah global2
>> blah global1 blah global2 blah blah
>> global2 blah blah blah blah
>> blah blah global2 blah blah
>>
>> And said (paraphrased) “Did you really mean ‘global1’ on line 4 of that
>> second chunk?”
>>
>>
>> — Marshall
>>
>>
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>
>
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