libgit2 VS FlatBuffers

Everything that is replicated on the network is stored as a Git object, using the libgit2[0] library. This library uses hardened SHA-1 internally, which is called sha1dc (for "detect collision").

[0]: https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/blob/ac0f2245510f6c75db1b...

This is delightful and I can't wait to try it out. Right now, the libgit2 project (https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2) has a custom HTTP git server wrapper that will throttle the responses down to a very slow rate. It's fun watching a `git clone` running over 2400 baud modem speeds, but it's actually been incredibly helpful for testing timeouts, odd buffering problems, and other things that crop up in weird network environments.

I'd love to jettison our hacky custom code and use something off-the-shelf instead.

I've built a UI on top of libgit2 and I wish that this blog post expanded on which new features are missing (sparse checkout?).

To quote: "The migration to Git Executable will allow us to resolve long-standing issues with GitKraken Client, such as poor LFS performance, SSH configuration support and many other features/performance improvements."

I agree on LFS performance on Windows. SSH config support is a pain due to libssh2 but openssh support is on the way (https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2/pull/6617).

There are many cons to using the Git executable itself (parsing output, error reporting, version handling). Seems to me that there's more to this?

I'm curious about the license change? This is an executable is it not? Invoking it as a separate process does not require you make the software calling it GPL so switching to MIT should have no affect in the common case.

If the authors really wanted a more permissive license, then instead of relicensing from AGPL to MIT they should have gone AGPL with linking exception. An example of a project that does this is libgit2 [1]. This licensing is more permissive but still permits the author to sell commercial licenses to those making closed-source code changes.

[1] https://github.com/libgit2/libgit2#license

Using libxlsxwriter and libgit, it's straightforward -- just putting the equivalent of git shortlog and lines added and removed into a line of cells.

I don't work at Cloudflare but follow their work and occasionally work on performance sensitive projects.

If I had to guess, they looked at the landscape a bit like I do and regarded Cap'n Proto, flatbuffers, SBE, etc. as being in one category apart from other data formats like Avro, protobuf, and the like.

So once you're committed to record'ish shaped (rather than columnar like Parquet) data that has an upfront parse time of zero (nominally, there could be marshalling if you transmogrify the field values on read), the list gets pretty short.

https://capnproto.org/news/2014-06-17-capnproto-flatbuffers-... goes into some of the trade-offs here.

Cap'n Proto was originally made for https://sandstorm.io/. That work (which Kenton has presumably done at Cloudflare since he's been employed there) eventually turned into Cloudflare workers.

Another consideration: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/issues/2#issuecomment-...

Much more in the discussion of this particular issue onGitHub: flatbuffers:Reverse engineering #4258

Related but not Rust-specific: FlatBuffers, Cap'n Proto.

If json files are a concern because of space, you can always look into something like protobuffers or flatbuffers. But whatever you use, you should try to find a solution where you don't have to think about the actual serialization/deserialization of your objects, and can just concentrate on the data.

Or, as an alternative to protobuffers, there's also flatbuffers, which is lighter weight and needs less memory: https://google.github.io/flatbuffers/

As the title suggests, I am considering using Flatbuffers as a way to parse sensor data that has been stored in local datafiles. The project language is python.