Elixir-Native Diff and Patch

[andyl]

Rfx needs diff and patch functions. For prototyping, these are implemented with System.call("diff", ...). This workaround will work on Linux systems, but not on Windows. We need a Elixir native implementation of diff and patch.

See Module: Rfx.source.

[andyl]

Possible helper tools:

• Differ
• String.meyers_difference/2

[andyl]

A bit more on this issue:

• we only need diff for strings - not for structs, lists etc
• we desire to limit the number of 3rd party dependencies - solutions based on 'stdlib' and/or plain elixir code are preferred
• the exact format of the diff data structure doesn't matter - if we need to output a specific data format we can use a converter
• it must be possible to serialize the diff data structure to/from JSON

[axelson]

Definitely agreed on minimizing the 3rd party dependencies :)

ElixirLS has a myers_diff_to_text_edits function that might serve as good inspiration: https://github.com/elixir-lsp/elixir-ls/blob/6a786d7d9e7ca97a2c9c77ea4acd0057a98734d8/apps/language_server/lib/language_server/providers/formatting.ex#L72