On the methodology of three-way structured merge in version control systems: Top-down, bottom-up, or both

Three-way merging is an essential component of version control systems. Despite the efficiency of the conventional line-based textual methods, syntax-based structured approaches have demonstrated benefits in improving merge accuracy. Prior structured merging approaches visit abstract syntax trees in a top-down manner, which struggles to identify and merge shifted code generally. This work introduces a novel methodology combining a top-down and a bottom-up visit of abstract syntax trees, which manipulates shifted code effectively and elegantly. Especially, we reduce the merge problem of ordered lists to computing a topological sort of strongly connected components of the constraint graph. Compared with four representative merge tools in 40,533 real-world merge scenarios, our approach achieves the highest merge accuracy while being 2.5x as fast as a state-of-the-art structured merge tool.