Improving performance on complex diffs
Bitbucket Cloud is making changes to pull request diff functionality that will improve diff performance, particularly on complex diffs. We are changing our diff algorithm from what we call a '3-way' diff to a 2-way 'three-dot' diff, which will show the difference between the tip of a source branch and the commit from which it branched off the destination, as shown below. This new diff will be implemented on the Pull request page and Branch page in the coming weeks.
The main difference is the '3-way' diff includes changes to the destination branch, whereas the 'three-dot' diff does not reflect changes made to the destination branch since the source branch was created from the destination branch. This small difference better isolates the changes introduced by the source branch and also allows the diff to be calculated much more quickly, resulting in improved diff performance, especially on complex diffs.
In most cases, you will have the same diff experience: When users make changes in some file(s) and others make changes to other files, the diff shown to the user will be exactly the same as it is today (only faster).
