What’s the long term strategy for this code base? Does the author expect community code contribution or just bug reports or maybe just test contributions?
In 6 months, seeing no adoption, move the repo to maintenance mode. Archive in 12 months.
Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
21–30 of 318 posts
Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
#22So, they "decided" it's not a derivative and thus can be listened under MIT instead of GPL....
Yeah, that's usually how contracts work.
You decide whether you have followed it or not. The other party will decide if they agree. If in dispute, you go to a judge and they decide also.
Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
#23I have been working on the same problem in other areas. My ultimate goal is to rewrite nginx in Rust passing as much as the upstream tests as possible while leveraging the strongest aspects of Ruts ecosystem - i.e. rustls (modern memory safe OpenSSL), Tokio (async runtime), h2 (http 2 impl) rather than implementing from scratch like the upstream. I started with Lua, then porting over Valkey, and now working on nginx. The reason was because I wanted to learn the ins and outs before taking on the most complex portion.
[1]. https://github.com/ianm199/lua-rs/tree/main Lua
[2]. https://github.com/ianm199/valdr Valkey/ Redis
[3]. https://github.com/ianm199/nginx-rs-port nginx
Happy to answer any questions on the approach! When I started a few weeks ago the harnesses on their own were not good enough to get very far without a "meta harness" of sorts but that is changing largely with Claude Workloads and Mythos. A lot of the work is developing some custom tooling to move these along faster.
Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
#24> the result is Grit, a from-scratch, library-based, memory-safe, idiomatic Rust reimplentation of Git that passes over 99% of the entire Git test suite. Why not 100%? > It's not actually passing every single test, though that is on purpose. I did mark some parts of the testing suite as "skipped" because I don't think it's worth recreating them in a library like this > 41,715 / 42,001 tests passing (99.3%) So it is n…
There is often good reasons for these purposeful digressions. I.e. in nginx the unit tests cover cyphers that are considered unsafe and not supported by modern libraries like rustls https://github.com/rustls/rustls. It is reasonable to make a new implementation and leave behind a bit of baggage.
Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
#25This is coming from a cofounder at github, someone who probably knows precisely what the GPL is for. Whatever the legal merits, building on a GPL3 project's complete test suite and relicensing under MIT is not acting in good faith toward the original authors. I really find it disgusting and it makes me want to avoid gitbutler entirely.
Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
#26> A pretty fun experiment and I think we can shape this into something truly useful to the whole community.
Agree with first half of this sentence, we should all have fun with experiments.
> It was never based on a linkable and reentrant library, but instead on a "Unix" philosophy of chaining together simpler commands, which means that it's difficult to use it in long running processes without fork/exec overhead for everything.
Ahhh now we have philosophical disagreement in the only place in the entire article that says "why". Unix is a feature, it's arguably more important in current time: https://aperocky.com/blog/post.html?slug=unix-philosophy-age...
Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
#27> A pretty fun experiment and I think we can shape this into something truly useful to the whole community. Agree with first half of this sentence, we should all have fun with experiments. > It was never based on a linkable and reentrant library, but instead on a "Unix" philosophy of chaining together simpler commands, which means that it's difficult to use it in long running processes without fork/exec overhead for…
You cut that citation conveniently short.
> It was never based on a linkable and reentrant library, but instead on a "Unix" philosophy of chaining together simpler commands, which means that it's difficult to use it in long running processes without fork/exec overhead for everything.
Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
So .7% tests fail therefor it was 100% a waste of time?
Regardless, what's the point?
The article starts out with paragraphs about the history and motivation.
> it made me wonder about the feasibility of using that same approach to accomplish something I've been dreaming about for 15 years now,
> which means that it's difficult to use it in long running processes without fork/exec overhead for everything.
> What if we used the same basic idea that Anthropic used on their from-scratch C compiler? Start a brand new implementation, design it as a Rust library, then throw a swarm of agents at the problem
Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
#29Theres already git-in-rust project that is making good progress
Re: Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
#30I have been working on the same problem in other areas. My ultimate goal is to rewrite nginx in Rust passing as much as the upstream tests as possible while leveraging the strongest aspects of Ruts ecosystem - i.e. rustls (modern memory safe OpenSSL), Tokio (async runtime), h2 (http 2 impl) rather than implementing from scratch like the upstream. I started with Lua, then porting over Valkey, and now working on nginx.…
Yeah I got one, why? You aren't learning anything, you are just copying code from other codebases and smashing it together to make some nginx-rust thingie... for what actual goal?