- Adding a line: ✅
- Removing a line: ✅
- Modifying a line: ✅
- Moving a codeblock: ❌ i see you've rewritten everything, let me just highlight it all.
RIP reviewers on my PR.
(Meme created by my coworker)
this post was submitted on 20 Oct 2023
583 points (97.9% liked)
Programmer Humor
32479 readers
223 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not necessarily about the load, it's about the algorithmic complexity. Going from lists (lines in a file, characters in a line) to trees introduces a potentially exponential increase in complexity due to the number of ways the same list of elements can be organized into a tree.
Also, you're underestimating the amount of processing. It's not about pure CPU computations but RAM access or even I/O. Even existing non-semantic diff implementations are unexpectedly inadequate in terms of performance. You clearly haven't tried diffing multi-GB log files.
Log files wouldn't fall under the banner of compiled languages or ASTs, so I'm not sure how that example applies.
And I'm aware that it can lead to O(n²) complexity but, as others have provided, there are already tools that do this, so it is within the capabilities of modern processors
Yes there will be cases where the size of the search space will make it prohibitive to run in reasonable times but this is - by merit of the existing tools and the fact that they seem to work quite well - an edge case.
Log files themselves don't, but I'm just comparing it with simpler files with simpler structure with simpler algorithms with better complexity.