Semantic-Version-Control | A project for the 2011 Yahoo hackathon at Berkeley

Semantic-Version-Control is a JavaScript library. Semantic-Version-Control has no bugs, it has no vulnerabilities and it has low support. You can download it from GitHub.

Normal version control systems operate on text which just happens to make up programs. However, programs are not fundamentally made up of text—they are made up of code. Our version control system takes this into account, versioning not the actual text of the program but a parse tree. Operating on the semantic meaning of the code rather than its text offers many advantages for all facets of version control. Using this system, we have more meaningful diffs and larger amounts of information about the history of the. For example, we know when a revision has only changed comments; these revisions can be ignored when looking for bugs because they did not affect that actual code of the program at all. Additionally, the semantic information can be used to improve both diffing and merging. We know when two variables are the same—not only in terms of their code, but in terms of the meaning of the code. We can ignore variables that are in different scopes but only share a name while unifying variables that are actually the same across disparate parts of the source code.