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semantic/weekly/2016-06-21.md
2016-06-21 12:34:19 -04:00

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# Semantic Diff Problems (Mini-Summit)
### Performance (most significant problem)
- SES / Alignment are biggest time / space consumers.
- Profiling small subsets of code paths rather than the full context.
- Adding more criterion benchmarks for code paths not currently profiled (like Diff Summaries).
##### Alignment performance
- Has to visit each child of each remaining line.
##### [SES](https://github.com/github/semantic-diff/files/22485/An.O.ND.Difference.Algorithm.and.its.Variations.pdf) Performance
- n^3 the size of the tree.
- Can try bounded SES (looks ahead by a fixed size of nodes).
- Identify more comparisons we can skip (i.e. don't compare functions with array literals).
- Does not look like there are more easy wins here (algorithm is already implemented to prevent unnecessary comparisions).
- In some cases, the diffing is expensive because we don't have more fine-grain identifiers for certain diffs. (e.g. a test file with 100 statement expressions).
- Diffing against identifiers (use the edit distance to determine whether to compare terms with SES or not).
- This could result in us missing a function rename though.
- Not a catchall, but it can help increase performance in a larger number of cases.
##### [RWS](https://github.com/github/semantic-diff/files/325837/RWS-Diff.Flexible.and.Efficient.Change.Detection.in.Hierarchical.Data.pdf) Performance
- Random Walk Similarity.
- computes approximation to the minimal edit script.
- O(log N) rather than O(n^3).
- RWS does not rely on identifiers.
- RWS solves our performance problem in the general form.
- Can allow us to diff patches of patches (something we cannot do currently with our implementation of SES).
##### Diff summaries performance
- Performance of DS is dependent on diffing (Diff Terms, Interpreter, cost functions)
### Failing too hard
- Request is not completing if Semantic Diff fails.
- How can we fail better on dotcom?
- How can we fail better when parsing? (both in Semantic Diff and dotcom)
### Responsiveness
- Async fetch diff summaries / diffs / progressive diffs or diff summaries
### Improving grammars
- Fix Ruby parser.
- Testing and verifying other grammars.
### Measure effectiveness of grammars
### Tooling
- Why isn't parallelization of SES having the expected effect?
- Should focus on low hanging fruit but we're not going to write a debugger.
### Time limitations with respect to solutions and team
### Ramp up time is extremely variable.
### Onboarding
- Pairing has been fantastic.
- SES algorithm requires some context and background to understand the code at the general / macro level.
- Plan a bit before pairing to gain context.
### Pre-launch Ideas
- Test on a couple file server nodes and run semantic diff on javascript repos.
- Collect repos, files, shas that contain error nodes to gain a % of error rates and expose errors in tree sitter grammars.
- If sources have errors, can we use a parser that validates the source is correct?
- Configure a script that is as language independent as possible that can automate the error collection process but allows us to specify an independent validating parser for each language.