[morepedantic]

I've seen this exact problem in C code many times in my life, especially in kernel space where data structures and memory allocations are fun.

Ironically, this is much _faster_ for small sets. Sometimes the error is intentional, because the programmer believes that all inputs will be small. IME, those programmers were wrong, but that's the inverse of survival bias.

[masklinn]

And in fairness I can understand not considering someone might eventually be bundling a repository with tens of thousands of refs back in early 2009.

[nayak]

Even now, the contrast between repository sizes is wide. Most repos contain 1000s of references, which while not the best to run O(N^2) algorithm, is still okay. But as a Git forge, you also see a share of repositories which contain millions of references.