semantic/ROADMAP.md

Roadmap

This is the long form version of our roadmap project.

Things we are currently doing:

1. Diff summaries for C & JavaScript. Q3 2016 or so.

• Modelling the abstract semantics of the supported languages. Good summaries require us to know what different parts of the syntax represent.
• Performance/responsiveness. We need to be able to produce diffs more quickly, and without unicorns. Some of this will involve front-end work (e.g. requesting summaries out-of-band).

2. Semantic diffs on .com for C & JavaScript. Q4 2016 or so.

• Performance, as above.
• Resilience. A fault in semantic-diff should not break anything else.
• Metrics. We need to know how it’s behaving in the wild to know what to do about it. This also includes operational metrics such as health checks.

Follow-up things:

1. Add support for more languages: Ruby, etc.
2. Detecting & rendering moves.
3. Merging.
4. Refining the diff summaries we produce.

Things we would like to do:

1. Interactively refining diffs.
2. Filtering diffs.
3. Diff table of contents.
4. Jump to symbol definition.
5. Eliminate conflicts from renaming variables.

Things we would like to do modulo interest/support from other teams:

1. APIs/tooling for data science & engineering teams.
2. Collect data on our heuristics &c. and refine them via e.g. ML.
3. Diffs as a service.