I’ve used diff and merge tools since the year dot. They let you compare two files and see on what lines they differ. You can also copy individual or blocks of lines from one to the other; that’s the merge. My all-time favourite was the commercial Araxis Merge which did a three way comparison and could be controlled by COM. I did this to compare two code bases.

Ten years earlier code for Base Metals (commodities trading) had been forked from Oil Trading software. There were ten years of changes to both sets of code and my job was to merge them back into one code base. I wrote a program to walk Araxis Merge through all folders of both code sets and out-put the differences, Then I could start merging where they differed. It still took about two months but I couldn’t have done it as quick without Araxis.

However most of us don’t have access to Enterprise tools, so here are two alternatives. The first is Devart’s Code Compare (that’s the image above) and the second is a free Extension for Visual Studio Code called Diff & Merge. I’ve added both to the Links to C utilities page.