Re: [DISCUSS] Introducing Rust into the Git project

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jan 10, 2024, 22:11 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqjzog96uh.fsf@gitster.g>
In-Reply-To: <b2651b38a4f7edaf1c5ffee72af00e46@manjaro.org>

Dragan Simic <dsimic@manjaro.org> writes:

> Thus, Git should probably follow the same approach of not converting
> the already existing code, but frankly, I don't see what would
> actually be the "new leafs" written in Rust.

A few obvious ones that come to my mind are that you should be able to write a new merge strategy and link the resulting binary into Git without much hassle. You might even want to make that a dynamically loaded object. The interface into a merge strategy is fairly narrow IIRC. Or possibly a new remote helper.

Adding a new refs backend may need to wait for the work Patrick is doing to add reftable support, but once the abstraction gets to the point to sufficiently hide the differences between files and reftables backends, I do not see a reason why you cannot add the third one.

And more into the future, we might want to have an object DB abstraction, similar to how we abstracted refs API over time, at which time you might be writing code that stores objects to and retrieves objects from persistent redis and whatnot in your favorite language.