alt Hacker NewsI’m all for memory safety and such but honestly what’s the use case for this? Showing off agentic development? In 10+ years git has never failed on a memory overflow or else. Sometimes software is “good as is” and I’m pretty confident git classifies as such. I’ve also never really hit the limitations of git, even with teams of 20+ developers and lots of binary artefacts. You got to really stretch git limitations, in which case you might need to move away from git, and a rust rewrite will not help in any way whatsoever. So again … why?
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I addressed this in the post, but Git has no linkable library and never has. If you want to do even something small, you need to fork/exec a process and communicate with it via stdin/out. Or completely reimplement it and all of the edge cases - for example, reading even one object can be either loose (easy) or in a packfile (much more difficult). Reading a reference (what SHA does a branch point to) can be in a loose file, a packfile, or a reftable. etc.
There is no way anyone would ever use this for it's CLI - it will almost certainly always be slower and worse in every way, even if I get it stable (which it's currently not). You can use libgit2 (a project I also helped kickstart), or Gitoxide (a project GitButler also currently helps drive) - they are faster and better in nearly every way, but they are not feature complete.
This isn't for the person using Git. This is for someone trying to build a tool that wants to use parts of Git, which is different.
How else could they launder the git license and set themselves up for a bait and switch later down the line?
Soon all the crustaceans will realize that C is better because AI can find all the vulnerabilities anyway.
Rust is some ugly poo.
License washing