I'm attempting to construct a “heatmap” from a multi-year history stored in a git repository where the unit of granularity is individual functions. Functions should grow hotter as they change more times, more frequently, and with more non-blank lines changed.

As a start, I examined the output of

git log --patch -M --find-renames --find-copies-harder --function-context -- *.c

I looked at using Language.C from Hackage, but it seems to want a complete translation unit—expanded headers and all—rather being able to cope with a source fragment.

The --function-context option is new since version 1.7.8. The foundation of the implementation in v1.7.9.4 is a regex:

PATTERNS("cpp",
         /* Jump targets or access declarations */
         "!^[ \t]*[A-Za-z_][A-Za-z_0-9]*:.*$\n"
         /* C/++ functions/methods at top level */
         "^([A-Za-z_][A-Za-z_0-9]*([ \t*]+[A-Za-z_][A-Za-z_0-9]*([ \t]*::[ \t]*[^[:space:]]+)?){1,}[ \t]*\\([^;]*)$\n"
         /* compound type at top level */
         "^((struct|class|enum)[^;]*)$",
         /* -- */
         "[a-zA-Z_][a-zA-Z0-9_]*"
         "|[-+0-9.e]+[fFlL]?|0[xXbB]?[0-9a-fA-F]+[lL]?"
         "|[-+*/<>%&^|=!]=|--|\\+\\+|<<=?|>>=?|&&|\\|\\||::|->"),

This seems to recognize boundaries reasonably well but doesn’t always leave the function as the first line of the diff hunk, e.g., with #include directives at the top or with a hunk that contains multiple function definitions. An option to tell diff to emit separate hunks for each function changed would be really useful.

This isn’t safety-critical, so I can tolerate some misses. Does that mean I

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