From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Thu, 15 Aug 2013 17:31:47 GMT
Subject: Re: Understanding Git Under The Hood: Trees
Message-ID: <7vwqnmrhbw.fsf@alter.siamese.dyndns.org>
In-Reply-To: <520CCC53.4090308@op5.se>

Andreas Ericsson <ae@op5.se> writes:

> You seem to believe that the in-memory representation of trees have to
> be the same as the on-disk one. That's simply not true. Git cheats
> outrageously with internal formats for pretty much everything in order
> to squeeze out more performance.

While the last statement applies to other parts of the system, it is
not true for the in-core index design.  We always had a flat index,
and it is not cheating at all.  The original "tree" was also a flat
representation of everything under the sun, and hierarchical tree
objects came much later.