We know that code reviews are an important part of software development. The tools you use for this task must be reliable. Therefore we want to be transparent about what SemanticDiff cannot do at this moment. On this page you will find a list of known limitations.

Code must be syntactically correct

SemanticDiff must be able to “understand” your code in order to decide whether a change is relevant or irrelevant. This is only possible if the code being analyzed is syntactically correct. If the code cannot be parsed correctly, SemanticDiff will display a fallback diff (if enabled) or fail with an error instead.

You may encounter false positives where syntactically correct code is rejected. This usually means that SemanticDiff doesn’t support a certain language construct yet. Please file a bug in our issue tracker and we will try to fix this in the next update.

VS Code specific limitations

We are trying our best to integrate SemanticDiff with the rest of Visual Studio Code, but our use case (adding an alternative diff) is not well covered by the extension API. This leads to some limitations:

• You can’t edit the code in our diff view
• Review comments and other features offered by third party extensions are not available in SemanticDiff

GitHub specific limitations

Our GitHub App offers all features needed when reviewing a pull request with the following exceptions:

• You can’t resolve / unresolve threads yet

You came across a limitation not listed here? Feel free to open a feature request in our issue tracker.