Comment by lstamour

Git actually does ship with parsers for different programming languages, I believe, because when you do a diff, it captions the changed lines with the function call they're from, etc. That said I've also used third-party "semantic diff" tools (generally for Windows) that have integrations with git. It's really nice when Github can't merge something, but you can, easily, locally, with a semantic merge/diff tool called from git.