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by tankenmate 268 days ago
I'm sure you are aware, reading between the lines of what you said, why, but for some others who aren't aware of the history of git; it was originally about 50% C and 50% Perl, the performance critical parts were written in C and then various git commands were written in Perl. Over time almost all the Perl was removed because there were less Perl monks than C devs.

Now it would seem the logic is reversed; even though there are less Rust devs than C devs, Rust is going to replace C. Maybe now that git is large enough and entrenched enough such a move can be forced through.

1 comments

> it was originally about 50% C and 50% Perl, the performance critical parts were written in C and then various git commands were written in Perl.

IIRC, it was mostly shell, not Perl, and looking at the proportion is misleading: the low-level commands (the "plumbing") like git-cat-file or git-commit-tree were all in C, while the more user-friendly commands (the "porcelain") like git-log or git-commit were all shell scripts calling the low-level commands. Yes, even things we consider fundamental today like "git commit" were shell scripts.