Posted by FabCH 21 hours ago
OmniDiff can diff: code (25 languages), config, images, PDFs, archives, cursors, fonts...
It's fast. It can diff C++ files of tens of thousands of lines in under 100ms, on a 2023 ThinkPad T14s.
It's open source. AGPLv3.
It's based on real diffs. I looked at the 7400 repositories that are listed in Gentoo packages, sampled 2000 diffs and solved them manually to get a good understanding of what is needed, before putting together the diff pipelines for each content type. Incidentally, this also forms the basis of the CI pipeline, so the robustness of the codebase is quite high.
I'm still developing it. It's v0.3.0 at this time. But I have been using it daily as my git difftool for months now, and it works well.
AI Disclosure: Yes, I do use AI. No, I do not vibecode.
Difftastic only diffs code, which is only 2/3 of all diffs.
When only measured on stuff difftastic supports:
Difftastic is perfect on 64% of diffs and near-perfect on 17% more.
Omnidiff is perfect on 90% of diffs and near-perfect on 5% more.
Speed is
p50 - 35ms difftastic vs 4ms OmniDiff p99 - 637ms vs 420ms
Difftastic wins on license. MIT vs AGPL.
I'm a little confused on that, since in other comments you've mentioned that AGPL was a deliberate choice for <reasons>. So, what's the definitions of "winning" here?
But it was worth pointing out the difference in license, it is one of the ways in which the projects differ.
Discrete users would arguably win more with integrity of AGPL, but developers have reasons to prefer MIT.
Hi! as a developer, I personally prefer it when the libraries/tools used in my projects are GPL or another Copyleft license. The drove of MIT projects from the past decade has been depressing.
IMO, you should seek to make this a standard that wins, and hopefully other opportunities that come will be where you make commercial hay. My unsolicited 2c.
I actually don’t care about the commercial license. It’s more of an experiment for my own amusement than an actual attempt at building a commercial project.
If it inspires someone to build another one and we still end up with a better differ, I’m ok with that world. As long as the open source community has a better differ.
Note that there already are at least 3 that I am aware of. But they do perform worse on speed and accuracy.
This is not to say you can't or shouldn't use AI, but it's important to understand the tradeoffs you're making.
[1] https://www.scotusblog.com/cases/thaler-v-perlmutter/ [2] https://www.jenner.com/en/news-insights/client-alerts/us-cop...
That said, even under those rules, I would be comfortable arguing before the court that this code has significant human involvement and easily passes the copyright standard.
It’s also why I don’t think someone can just easily create another one and license it under BSD. My code is AI assisted, but all truly important pieces were human made.
Get one AI to describe what the code does, and another to implement based on that description. You might even get away with a human doing one of the steps. A variation of the classic “clean room reverse engineering” method that was used by Compaq to reimplement IBM's BIOS and start the clone PC market.
Some argue that “it doesn't work like that” but it certainly seems to be what some people are doing and as yet no one has been confident enough that their copyright extends through this mechanism that they've tested the theory in court.
Note: I'm not saying it is right, but that it might well be perfectly legal. It is definitely possible, practical even. I'd still release stuff under AGPL/similar for the same reasons stated above, but I'd not operate under any illusion that I'd be safe from someone using that method to copy everything they wanted to.
But I am counting on the fact that _companies_ would be too worried about legal uncertainty to try this.
Oh, my sweet summery child :-)
Companies have been doing far more dodgy things, things that look objectively illegal where-as the clean-room reverse engineering thing looks to me (caveat: not a legal expert at all) to be legally defensible, for a long time, definitely pre-AI.
Even if a company operating in your jurisdiction, where you as an individual might have a cat in hell's chance of even trying to sort the situation to your preference, might not, you can bet your last <currency unit> that a company elsewhere will feel more free to do so if they wanted what you have without agreeing to your terms.
If it’s a small company, it’s not worth it, but then again they are not causing a lot of damage either. If it’s a big company, they will find me unexpectedly resistant to usual legal bullying tactics. I have legal insurance, multiple lawyers as friends and don’t have a job so have loads of time for filing paperwork.
Though AI code copyright is an unknown pretty widely either way, it's too new for the legal system to have caught up with it yet.
… we don’t know what to do with AI copyright either. I assume a referendum will sort it out at some point.
Diffsitter and Difftastic have been around for a while, both MIT, so I doubt it.
Delta adds color to the standard git diff algorithm.
Omnidiff uses a completely different algorithm.
About a third of diffs are significantly better.
In the meantime, I added support for all other non-code file formats. Hence the name change.
It’s quite a big chunk of functionality.
I actually do TWO solutions for each test case: a minimal diff and a maximal diff. Pressing 'm' in the TUI pops up a settings page where you can choose how the diff works.
I am actively researching how many ways there are to "paint" the same diff and user preferences and non-uniqueness of diffs is something I am super interested in.
If you would like to, it would be super useful for me to know what diff you don't like and why. It would help make the diff better for users with different visual preferences.
Nobody wants to use AGPL-v3?