libgit2 VS mold

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 think this is unlikely to gain traction. I say that no to discourage you, just to explain.

- The community has an instinctive distrust of closed source or a compiler from an untrusted source. If you’re familiar with the Trusting Trust attack you’ll understand why.

- Dev tools in every language ecosystem are almost always free, unless they involve some kind of hosting. People aren’t used to opening their wallets. Look the experience of the guy who built the mold linker(https://github.com/rui314/mold). Far superior to the state of art, improves incremental compiles a lot, widely applicable across ecosystems (C, C++, Rust), CPU architectures and Operating Systems. You don’t even have to modify your compiler, just need to point to his linker. He’s even giving it away for free for personal use. But still, almost no one uses it. The inertia of the established options is really high.

- It’s not complex enough. Think about the complexity involved in the cranelift backend. No one can seriously recreate the efforts of bjorn3. If we could have, we would have. But the idea idea here can be recreated, especially by the experts who already built incremental compilation into rustc.

- But if your solution is truly complex, like the parallel frontend, the burden of maintaining a fork would be too high. You’d have to spend all your time rebasing.

Again I’m not trying to discourage you, just stating the difficulties of making a business in the dev tools space. You would be better off contributing this excellent work to the community and trying a different tack.

I initially thought this would be about the mold linker (https://github.com/rui314/mold)

I assume this submission is trying to highlight the specific message (2023-01-24) : https://github.com/rui314/mold/issues/190#issuecomment-14028...

Fyi... the author wrote a more expansive blog post about selling dev tools a few months later (2023-06-06) and there was a related HN thread about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36225016

Loongson's LoongArch CPU has been supported. (03b1a1c)

I'm amazed at how quickly the author responds to requests: https://github.com/rui314/mold/issues/1057

From the report to the fix in less than two days.

I'm not sure how competitive it will be with lld, especially if we consider ThinLTO (which takes multiple minutes on 64-core machine) - it can make the advantages of mold insignificant.

What other solutions have you tried for the problem of slow linking? You haven't even said which linker and what flags you're using. I haven't actually tried it, but the author of gold has an even faster linker called mold: https://github.com/rui314/mold

> Mold did it first, though: https://github.com/rui314/mold

Before LLD?