Re: newbie questions about git design and features (some wrt hg)

On Tue, 30 Jan 2007, Mike Coleman wrote:
> 
> As for performance, my thinking was that since hg is implemented
> apparently almost entirely in Python, and has (again apparently)
> generally acceptable performance, this suggested that much of the
> problem might be I/O-bound enough that language efficiency might not
> matter so much.

Note that git actually implements a lot more than hg does.

hg depends on external programs (almost uniformly written in C) to do the 
actual diff generation, 3-way merging etc. 

Git actually ends up doing all of those internally, and minimizes external 
dependencies that way. More importantly, perhaps, it allows us to do a 
better job, faster. The early example of this is patch application, where 
git supports a much nicer patch format that can express renames etc in the 
patch.

But I'll admit - my main reason going with C is (a) it's what I know and 
(b) I absolutely _hate_ being constrained by the language. The great thing 
about C (still) is that you can do *anything* in it. You're literally 
limited by hardware, and by your own abilities. Nothing else.

			Linus
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