alt Hacker NewsOne nice thing about serializing/transmitting AST changes is that it makes it much easier to to compose and transform change sets.
The text based diff method works fine if everyone is working off a head, but when you're trying to compose a release from a lot of branches it's usually a huge mess. Text based diffs also make maintaining forks harder.
Git is going to become a big bottleneck as agents get better.
what do you actually gain over enforced formatting?
first you should not be composing releases at the end from conflicting branches, you should be integrating branches and testing each one in sequence and then cutting releases. if there are changes to the base for a given branch, that means that branch has to be updated and re-tested. simple as that. storing changes as normalized trees rather than normalized text doesn't really buy you anything except for maybe slightly smarter automatic merge conflict resolution but even then it needs to be analyzed and tested.