> Starting with C was great for performance of Git
replyIsn't the entire git rebase logic written in Bash scripts? Or was originally?
Possibly? I'm sure I read that the first "release" of git was five barely documented binaries that could be strung together to do version control.
reply> Writing your tooling in python is valid while starting out and prototyping.
replyThis fallacy again. Tell me, when did Mercurial decide "ok the prototype is done, we'll rewrite it in a proper language"?
They didn't, of course. Because nobody ever does. Your "prototype" gradually becomes a 100k line product that you can't afford to rewrite.
(I guess you can YOLO it with AI these days but that wasn't an option for Mercurial.)
> Starting with C was great for performance of Git, but damn if it's not a terrible UX these days
Git's terrible UX doesn't have anything to do with C. C doesn't make you always pick a different flag for "delete".
The Mercurial project has been incrementally rewriting core operations in Rust for several years now. As Pierre-Yves says in the talk, you can do an hg status on a million-file repo in 100ms. I rewrote hg annotate (aka blame) in Rust last year.
replyIt's kind of late, though, right? Git had core components ("plumbing") in C from 2005, with gradual rewriting of the "porcelain" layer from Perl to C in the late 2000s and early 2010s. People have been complaining about Mercurial performance for a long time. I'm sure the Python 2->3 headache did not help.
replyThere was no headache. The migration was extremely smooth.
replyI genuinely can't tell if this is sarcasm or a Python3 true believer.
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