Rendering huge pull requests in the GitHub Copilot app
How we rebuilt the diff surface in the GitHub Copilot app to open a million-line pull request with hundreds of inline review comments. The post Rendering huge pull requests in the GitHub Copilot app appeared first on The GitHub Blog .
The article discusses the challenges of rendering giant pull requests, such as those with 2,200 files and over a million changed lines, in the GitHub Copilot app. Virtualizing large diffs works well for code-only changes, but comments complicate matters. Comment heights depend on factors like markdown formatting, expandable sections, reply boxes, and image loading status, all of which are determined at render time.
This requires a different architecture and two distinct geometries: one for deterministic code height and another for dynamic block heights that can change during rendering. To address these issues, the article outlines a three-step process: measuring, instrumenting, and iterating on performance improvements. The key takeaways are the need for a new approach to handle comments and the implementation of a two-geometry system to maintain performance while rendering large pull requests.
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