add support for AST-diffing Solidity

[monperrus]

it would be great to add support for diffing Solidity.

For this we can use the existing support from solidity compiler solc

solc --ast-compact-json contract.sol

Flag --ast-compact-json gives the "AST of all source files in a compact JSON format."

[jrfaller]

Nice idea!

Apparently there is also a tree sitter grammar : https://github.com/JoranHonig/tree-sitter-solidity

[jrfaller]

I looked a little bit into the output of solc and it wouldn't be straightforward, the AST is quite far from the CST and lacking a lot of textual position information 😢

I'll try to see if I get more luck with the tree-sitter one ^^

[monperrus]

cool, thanks for the update

[jrfaller]

ok the tree-sitter version seems a little unstable I got a ValueError: Incompatible Language version 12. Must be between 13 and 13, so I'll have to retry that at some point in the future when it's more stable

[Coppelian]

Hello there. I found a parser: https://github.com/solidity-parser/parser
I wonder if it could be used in this case.

[jrfaller]

Hi, apparently there is a ANTLR grammar related to the code you point out here : https://github.com/solidityj/solidity-antlr4

And we have support for antlr grammars, so that might worth a try.

[monperrus]

For the record, we have a first prototype at https://github.com/mojtaba-eshghie/solidity-code-diff

[monperrus]

FYI, the paper on arxiv
SoliDiffy: AST Differencing for Solidity Smart Contracts
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2411.07718