Pijul: a distributed version control system, written in Rust (2019)

Regarding that second link about the bad merge, I think there is a deeper problem at hand. Namely that we still work with the textual representation of a program as the “source of truth”, but each time we save and commit this way, a lot of information is lost.

What I would like is instead of representing source code as text to have a binary representation of the AST of the software that I am writing where, crucially, all edit operations are recorded into history.

Perhaps such a binary format could even be slightly faster to work with in terms of time taken for editor and compiler to parse it?

And not only record edit operations, but differentiate between instancing and copying a node, so that we can express whether code that we duplicate should be edited everywhere automatically in the codebase when we change it, or if they should be allowed to diverge. (Both of which make sense in different contexts and would be great to actually express in the source representation and have the IDE read and understand.)

Furthermore, such a representation could allow for more freedom when positioning elements of the code because we aren’t constrained to just lines and lines of text with characters next to each other and lines above and below each other.

Now, a lot of non-textual editors exist already but I haven’t seen any that I like and besides I don’t want another language, I want to write Rust code in such a way as outlined here.

FWIW, this has gotten a certain amount of attention on HN over the years since it was begun but it's instantly noticeable that patches tailed off and stopped last June. Naturally that raises the question of "is this even still alive", and last month the starter of the project, Pierre Meunier, posted a response to a query about that indicating a major rewrite is in progress:

----

https://discourse.pijul.org/t/is-this-project-still-active-y...

>Is Pijul still under active development?

>That’s right, the last patches are pretty old. A few things have happened since then, but they’re not public yet. This has included (1) thinking about new algorithms to solve our remaining problems and (2) thinking about the future and sustainability of the project, including its funding.

>Another thing going on is a major rewrite of libpijul. This project was our first Rust project, was started in a pretty early version of Rust, on an incomplete theory that was only finalised in 2019. Until then it wasn’t clear what functions and types we wanted to expose, and how to document them.

>I’m currently reorganising everything, in particular using a lot more proc-macros, and making it more general so that it can run on various backends (well, actually different variants of Sanakirja).

>We will hopefully have news pretty soon. I’d love to fix all the bugs in the Nest discussions, my hope is that many of them will simply disappear with the rewrite.

----

Of course, everyone here probably knows about the risks of major rewrites, though granted that's lessoned for something that began in the research phase and never got close to a 1.0 and major uptake. It is a pretty interesting project and I'd love to see it go well, so hopefully it can make the series of transitions to something more mature and self-sustaining! For now though it looks like things will be in a bit of stasis, and everyone will have to wait and see what emerges on the other side.

> I admit the above is a bit much for most people.

True, but it's not just the UI: this also requires discipline and constant synchronisation in a team. Pijul achieves the same without much discipline.

Yeah that works, if people are disciplined (no merge origin/master into master ...). You don't see individual commits from feature branches though.

I'm glad this made the front page. I and other of my friends have tried a few times now with varying degrees of success.

For those of us pining for the days of darcs or wanting to escape the git monoculture, Pijul is really great.