Spork: Structured Merge for Java With Formatting Preservation

The highly parallel workflows of modern software development have made merging source code a common activity for developers. state the practice is based on line-based merge, which ubiquitously used with "git merge". Line-based merge however generalized technique any text that cannot leverage structured nature code, making conflicts occurrence. As remedy, research has proposed tools, typically operate abstract syntax trees instead raw text. Structured greatly reduces prevalence but suffers from important limitations, main ones being tendency to alter formatting merged and prone excessive running times. In this paper, we present SPORK, novel tool JAVA. SPORK unique as it preserves significantly greater degree than comparable state-of-the-art tools. also overall faster art, in particular reducing worst-case times practice. We demonstrate these properties by replaying 1740 real-world file merges collected 119 open-source projects, further several key differences between art in-depth case studies.