prost VS Git

The benchmark is not comparing apples to apples.

prost is the most widely used Protobuf implementation in Rust, maintained by the Tokio organization. prost generates structs and serialization/deserialization code for you.

easyproto according to GitHib Search is used only by two projects. easyproto provides primitives for serializing and deserializing Protobuf, and requires hand writing code to do both.

A fair comparison would be prost vs google.golang.org/protobuf, or easyproto vs parts of quick-protobuf.

In most cases you can make Go as fast as Rust, but from my experience writing performance-sensitive code in Go requires significantly larger time investment and overall requires deeper language expertise. Pebble (RocksDB replacement in Go by CockroachDB) is a good example of this, the codebase is littered with hand-inlined[1] functions, hand-unrolled loops and it's not[2] even using Go memory management for performance critical parts, it's using the C memory allocator and manual memory management.

[prost]: https://github.com/tokio-rs/prost

You could use Protocol buffers to define a message type, then use prost to generate encoding/decoding code for that type.

Thanks but that doesn't seems to support `json_mapping` , there is a draft available but not sure when it will get merged https://github.com/tokio-rs/prost/pull/558

Hi r/rust, I have a question regarding tonic-build (or prost-build).

Currently, I'm making some stuff by using protobuf via prost. Maybe you know, protobuf v3 treats all fields as optional, so it is pain to unwrap every nested field.

Note: one additional key feature currently missing from Prost is Proto2 extensions.

Boy, I can't find this either (but also, the kernel mailing list is _really_ difficult to search). I really remember Linus saying something like "it's not a real SCM, but maybe someone could build one on top of it someday" or something like that, but I cannot figure out how to find that.

You _can_ see, though, that in his first README, he refers to what he's building as not a "real SCM":

https://github.com/git/git/commit/e83c5163316f89bfbde7d9ab23...

Here is the direct link, as HN somehow removes the query string: https://github.com/git/git/commits?author=peff&since=2023-10...

I understand all that.

I'm saying, if you write a survey and one of the possible answers is "diff", but you don't clearly define what you mean by "diff", then don't be surprised if respondents use any reasonable definition that makes sense to them. Ask an ambiguous question, get a mishmash of answers.

The thing that Git uses for packfiles is called a "delta" by Git, but it's also reasonable to call it a "diff". After all, Git's delta algorithm is "greatly inspired by parts of LibXDiff from Davide Libenzi"[1]. Not LibXDelta but LibXDiff.

Yes, how Git stores blobs (using deltas) is orthogonal to how Git uses blobs. But while that orthogonality is useful for reasoning about Git, it's not wrong to think of a commit as the totality of what Git does, including that optimization. (Some people, when learning Git, stumble over the way it's described as storing full copies, think it's wasteful. For them to wrap their heads around Git, they have to understand that the optimization exists. Which makes sense because Git probably wouldn't be practical if it lacked that optimization.)

The reason I'm bringing all this up is, if you're trying to explain Git, which is what the original article is about, then it's very important to keep in mind that someone who is learning Git needs to know what you mean when you say "diff". Most people who already know Git would tend to gravitate toward the definition of "diff" that you're assuming (the thing that Git computes on the fly and never stores), but people who already know Git aren't the target audience when you're teaching Git.

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[1] https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/diff-delta.c

Didn't Git have a new default merge strategy, `ort` https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/Documentation/RelNote... ?

Yes, but you are referring to standalone scripts, not functions defined within a Bash script.

Compare for example the following helper code used for git command completion inside Bash and inside PowerShell.

Bash: https://github.com/git/git/blob/master/contrib/completion/gi...