An Objective-C API Diff Tool
For the last year most of my work has been in Objective-C framework development. With each release I would look through a diff of the headers since the previous release and make note of the API modifications so that users of the framework could easily see what had changed. While not terribly time consuming it was tedious and required some care, especially when declarations were relocated. Having previously contributed to the ObjectDoc project’s Objective-C wrapper for libclang, this seemed like a good opportunity to make use of that work and put together a tool to automate the diff generation. The result is objc-diff, a libclang-based tool to generate an Objective-C API diff report.
The reports generated by the tool (example) are similar to those provided by Apple for the system frameworks, with a couple of improvements:
When a class or protocol is moved to a different header a relocation is reported only for that entity rather than it and all of its methods and properties. The relocation of the children is implied and this eliminates a lot of noise from the report.
Conversions between explicit accessor methods and
@propertydeclarations are reported as modifications to the declaration rather than a series of additions and removals. This more accurately describes the change and makes the actual additions and removals easier to identify.
Binary releases are available on the project page, and the source is available on GitHub.