----- Original Message -----
From: Eric S. Raymond
Date: 12/11/2012 8:30 PM
It might be a good fit for extending git; I wouldn't be very surprised if
that worked. However, I do have concerns about the "Oh, we'll just
lash together a binding to C" attitude common among lua programmers; I
foresee maintainability problems and the possibility of slow death by
low-level details as that strategy tries to scale up.
I don't understand this statement: "Oh, we'll just lash together a
binding to C" attitude.
??
My sense is that git's use cases are better served by a glue language
in the Python/Perl/Ruby class rather than an extension langage. But
my mind is open on this issue.
I spend nearly 100% of my Git time on Windows.
Spawning new processes in Windows is dog slow. Using 'git rebase',
arguably my favorite Git command, is time-waiting torture. I'm also on
about as fast of a Windows machine as money can buy these days.
I have a Git add-on similar to git-media that uses the smudge and clean
filters to read/write large binary files into a separate storage
location. When checking out a workspace, Git shells out to run a filter
for each file it needs to write to the workspace.
I can get a maximum of 100 processes per second with this technique,
resulting in just 100 files being written to disk. However, I tend to
see closer to 60 files written to disk.
So, I patched Git to allow the smudge/clean filters to load up a DLL
that executes a Lua script. The Lua script properly retrieves+caches a
file locally, or it puts the file on a network share.
The in-process DLL checkout ends up being every bit as fast as when we
use Perforce to sync files to our local workspace. Git, then, can be a
Perforce replacement for our needs.
(For those who don't know, Perforce handles large workspaces with
massive binary files very efficiently.)
Anyway, my preference is to allow scripts to run in-process within Git,
because it is far, far faster on Windows. I imagine it is faster than
forking processes on non-Windows machines, too, but I have no statistics
to back that up.
Python, Perl, or Ruby can be embedded, too, but Lua probably embeds the
easiest and smallest out of those other 3 languages.
And shell scripts tend to be the slowest on Windows due to the excessive
numbers of process invocations needed to get anything reasonable done.
-Josh
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