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by gritzko 5 days ago
The only way out is malleable software. Have the core data structures and algorithms in a native library. Have a layer of JavaScript/Lua/LISP on top of that. Editable, customizable, reusable.

This is not a theory. I work in such a system every day.

git sort of tried that with plumbing/porcelain separation and bash scripts, but it did not quite work. It all became a C monolith with very peculiar UX.
1 comments
yencabulator 5 days ago
JJ's use of the Git file format is done via https://github.com/GitoxideLabs/gitoxide -- there's still some missing features in the networking part, but the local-file-manipulation features are fully there.
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gritzko 5 days ago
Great lib. I meant libdog, a different thing. gitoxide is like "git implemented in Rust" while libdog is "git's necessary primitives in C" (objects, packs, sync proto, own index format, diff/merge, etc). As a result, gitoxide is 270KLoC while libdog is 24KLoC, plus 44KLoC of tokenizers. libdog uses token-level algorithms for diff, merge, blame. It also does syntax highlighting in the pager - they all need grammars.
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