Extensible Language-Aware Merging

Parallel development has become standard practice in software development and maintenance. Though most every revision control and configuration management system provides some form of merging for combining changes made in parallel, these mechanisms often yield unsatisfactory results. The authors present a new merging algorithm, that uses a fast differencing algorithm and renaming analysis to provide better merge results. The system is language aware, but not language dependent and does not require a special editor, so it can be easily integrated in current development environments.