Re: Proposal/Discussion: Turning parts of Git into libraries

>
> On 2023-02-17 at 21:38:34, Emily Shaffer wrote:
> > For example, I seem to remember you saying during the SHA-256 series
> > that the next hashing algorithm would also be painful to implement;
> > would that still be true if the hashing algorithm is encapsulated well
> > by a library interface? Or is it for a different reason?
>
> Right now, most of the code for a future hash algorithm wouldn't be too
> difficult to implement, I'd think, because we can already support two of
> them.  If we decide, say, to implement SHA-3-512, we basically just add
> that algorithm, update all the entries in the tests (which is kind of a
> pain since there's a lot of them, but not really difficult), and then
> move on with our lives.
>
> The difficulty is dealing with interop work, which is basically
> switching from dealing with just one algorithm to rewriting things
> between the two on the fly.  I think _that_ work would be made easier by
> library work because sometimes it involves working with submodules, such
> as when updating the submodule commit, and being able to deal with both
> object stores more easily at the same time would be very helpful in that
> regard.

> I can imagine there are other things that would be easier as well, and I
> can also imagine that we'll have better control over memory allocations
> and leak less, which would be nice.  If we can get leaks low enough, we
> could even add CI jobs to catch them and fail, which I think would be
> super valuable, especially since I find even after over two decades of C
> that I'm still not very good about catching all the leaks (which is one
> of the reasons I've mostly switched to Rust).  We might also be able to
> make nicer steps on multithreading our code as well.
>
> Personally, I'd like to see some sort of standard error type (whether
> integral or not) that would let us do more bubbling up of errors and
> less die().  I don't know if that's in the cards, but I thought I'd
> suggest it in case other folks are interested.