idldiff

Extremely basic visual WebIDL comparison tool

Use it live at: https://inexorabletash.github.io/idldiff/

Instructions

• The top left/right panels are CodeMirror editors that do very basic syntax highlighting of WebIDL files
• Type or paste WebIDL in the left and right panels
• The WebIDL will be validated using webidl2.js
• The first error encountered will be shown at the bottom, with the offending line highlighted
• If both left and right WebIDL are valid, the parsed results (AST structures) will be compared and the first set of differences reported.

Caveats:

• The diff report is extremely dumb. Basically just a recursive JS comparison function, with some attempt to provide context.
• By default, member order for interfaces is ignored. This is to facilitate testing that reordering/commenting existing WebIDL files has not changed anything. To override this, load the page with ?order as a query parameter.
• webidl2.js is missing support for some newer WebIDL syntax such as iterable<>.

Hacking on it

To hack on it or host it locally, clone including submodules:

git clone --recursive git://github.com/inexorabletash/idldiff.git

Or:

git clone git://github.com/inexorabletash/idldiff.git
cd idldiff
git submodule update --init --recursive

Then just fire up a web server in the directory and load index.html

Roadmap

• Ideally, the parsed ASTs would be reserialized to WebIDL and compared using a proper diff algorithm.