A stab at building my own string diffing library

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Took a stab at building my own string diffing JS package. I built an interactive demo for TypeIt’s website (https://typeitjs.com/build-your-own) a while back. The approach I took to handle user input necessitated a way to calculate the difference between the versions of a user’s text input. I searched around for a package to help me out and found a couple of good ones (like fast-diff), but I either didn’t really like their API or didn’t want to take on a huge new dependency. Instead, I thought I’d give it a shot myself (famous last words). I dove into it having no real formal knowledge of the algorithmic approaches to string diffing, and so things got frustrating real fast. But then I figured out a way to build it out using JavaScript symbols to link characters that helped ease the complexity a ton. It all resulted in “striff,” which comes in at just over 600 bytes gzipped, and that I’ve been using in production for a couple of months now. It’s a little weird looking back now, because I don’t think I’d recommend someone taking the same path in building your own, but at the same time, there’s an immense satisfaction knowing I was able to figure out a pretty reliable approach. Check it out: https://github.com/alexmacarthur/striff

Visit product View on Hacker NewsMay 19, 2022

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