Our great sponsors
-
-
git-machete
Probably the sharpest git repository organizer & rebase/merge workflow automation tool you've ever seen
-
InfluxDB
Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale. Get real-time insights from all types of time series data with InfluxDB. Ingest, query, and analyze billions of data points in real-time with unbounded cardinality.
-
graphtage
A semantic diff utility and library for tree-like files such as JSON, JSON5, XML, HTML, YAML, and CSV.
-
SemanticDiff
Community support for SemanticDiff, the programming language aware diff for Visual Studio Code.
-
-
WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
-
I'm not seeing a git compatibility layer? So I think it's a neat project, but I probably won't try it because nearly all code is rooted squarely in git. Even if Pijul is perfect, you'd need to convince everyone else to use it.
Nevertheless, the increased interest in moving to patch based workflows from branch based ones is great. There's a lot of similar tools here (https://github.com/gitext-rs/git-stack/blob/main/docs/compar...) which I refer to infrequently.
Personally my favorite tool for living-with-the-reality-that-is-branches is git-machete (https://github.com/VirtusLab/git-machete).
I'm not seeing a git compatibility layer? So I think it's a neat project, but I probably won't try it because nearly all code is rooted squarely in git. Even if Pijul is perfect, you'd need to convince everyone else to use it.
Nevertheless, the increased interest in moving to patch based workflows from branch based ones is great. There's a lot of similar tools here (https://github.com/gitext-rs/git-stack/blob/main/docs/compar...) which I refer to infrequently.
Personally my favorite tool for living-with-the-reality-that-is-branches is git-machete (https://github.com/VirtusLab/git-machete).
I recently found out about another project called jj: https://github.com/martinvonz/jj. It takes inspiration from Pijul and others but is git-compatible.
I'm not familiar with Pijul, and haven't finished watching this presentation, but IME the problems with modern version control tools is that they still rely on comparing lines of plain text, something we've been doing for decades. Merge conflicts are an issue because our tools are agnostic about the actual content they're tracking.
Instead, the tools should be smarter and work on the level of functions, classes, packages, sentences, paragraphs, or whatever primitive makes sense for the project and file that is being changed. In the case of code bases, they need to be aware of the language and the AST of the program. For binary files, they need to be aware of the file format and its binary structure. This would allow them to show actually meaningful diffs, and minimize the chances of conflicts, and of producing a corrupt file after an automatic merge.
There has been some research in this area, and there are a few semantic diffing tools[1,2,3], but I'm not aware of this being widely used in any VCS.
Nowadays, with all the machine learning advances, the ideal VCS should also use ML to understand the change at a deeper level, and maybe even suggest improvements. If AI can write code for me, it could surely understand what I'm trying to do, and help me so that version control is entirely hands-free, instead of having to fight with it, and be constantly aware of it, as I have to do now.
I just finished watching the presentation, and Pijul seems like an iterative improvement over Git. Nothing jumped out at me like a killer feature that would make me want to give it a try. It might be because the author focuses too much on technical details, instead of taking a step back and rethinking what a modern VCS tool should look like today.
[1]: https://semanticdiff.com/
[2]: https://github.com/trailofbits/graphtage
[3]: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree
I'm not familiar with Pijul, and haven't finished watching this presentation, but IME the problems with modern version control tools is that they still rely on comparing lines of plain text, something we've been doing for decades. Merge conflicts are an issue because our tools are agnostic about the actual content they're tracking.
Instead, the tools should be smarter and work on the level of functions, classes, packages, sentences, paragraphs, or whatever primitive makes sense for the project and file that is being changed. In the case of code bases, they need to be aware of the language and the AST of the program. For binary files, they need to be aware of the file format and its binary structure. This would allow them to show actually meaningful diffs, and minimize the chances of conflicts, and of producing a corrupt file after an automatic merge.
There has been some research in this area, and there are a few semantic diffing tools[1,2,3], but I'm not aware of this being widely used in any VCS.
Nowadays, with all the machine learning advances, the ideal VCS should also use ML to understand the change at a deeper level, and maybe even suggest improvements. If AI can write code for me, it could surely understand what I'm trying to do, and help me so that version control is entirely hands-free, instead of having to fight with it, and be constantly aware of it, as I have to do now.
I just finished watching the presentation, and Pijul seems like an iterative improvement over Git. Nothing jumped out at me like a killer feature that would make me want to give it a try. It might be because the author focuses too much on technical details, instead of taking a step back and rethinking what a modern VCS tool should look like today.
[1]: https://semanticdiff.com/
[2]: https://github.com/trailofbits/graphtage
[3]: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree
I'm not familiar with Pijul, and haven't finished watching this presentation, but IME the problems with modern version control tools is that they still rely on comparing lines of plain text, something we've been doing for decades. Merge conflicts are an issue because our tools are agnostic about the actual content they're tracking.
Instead, the tools should be smarter and work on the level of functions, classes, packages, sentences, paragraphs, or whatever primitive makes sense for the project and file that is being changed. In the case of code bases, they need to be aware of the language and the AST of the program. For binary files, they need to be aware of the file format and its binary structure. This would allow them to show actually meaningful diffs, and minimize the chances of conflicts, and of producing a corrupt file after an automatic merge.
There has been some research in this area, and there are a few semantic diffing tools[1,2,3], but I'm not aware of this being widely used in any VCS.
Nowadays, with all the machine learning advances, the ideal VCS should also use ML to understand the change at a deeper level, and maybe even suggest improvements. If AI can write code for me, it could surely understand what I'm trying to do, and help me so that version control is entirely hands-free, instead of having to fight with it, and be constantly aware of it, as I have to do now.
I just finished watching the presentation, and Pijul seems like an iterative improvement over Git. Nothing jumped out at me like a killer feature that would make me want to give it a try. It might be because the author focuses too much on technical details, instead of taking a step back and rethinking what a modern VCS tool should look like today.
[1]: https://semanticdiff.com/
[2]: https://github.com/trailofbits/graphtage
[3]: https://github.com/GumTreeDiff/gumtree
Shameless plug: I've written difftastic[1], a tool that builds ASTs and then does a structural diff of them. You can use it with git too.
It's an incredibly hard problem though, both from a computational complexity point of view, and trying to build a comprehensible UI once you've done the structural AST diff.
[1]: https://github.com/wilfred/difftastic
There's many more akin projects listed in https://github.com/yairchu/awesome-structure-editors/blob/ma...
I can't wait fast enough for these ideas to reshape how we deal with programs and build stuff.
A few more implementations of the bisect-rebase idea:
https://github.com/CTSRD-CHERI/git-mergify-rebase