Beagle Alternatives

beagle reviews and mentions

• Shrimple – A Simpler, Nicer Markdown
  6 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Jul 2026
• Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with Agents
  15 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jun 2026

  Nice experiment, but a bit expensive.

  I work on Beagle, a git-compatible SCM [1]. I use ABC, Abstractionless C [2] dialect with slices, optional range checking, etc. So far, memory safety was the least of my concerns, frankly. Most of the thorny issues would be equally thorny in Rust (e.g. right now: reflog zeroed when VM ran out of disk space; must be some state machine issue or an OS level glitch). Also, forking off a C process (no runtime) is cheap enough that you actually want to do that more.

  But, those are all technicalities. The key issue I see with the approach: the data structures and algos of git have been fanatically fine tuned for that particular application with those particular usage patterns. By very sophisticated low-level C programmers. So, quite likely, any other app/lib working with that store will always be a suboptimal fit. I would recommend read-only access only, esp for LLM code.

  Meanwhile, git's underlying data model (blobs/trees/commits) is very simple and very much internet-standard level. Decoupling at that interface is so much easier with so much less issues looming.

  May look differently from your vantage point though.

  [1]: https://github.com/gritzko/beagle

• Interleaved Deltas
  1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 May 2026

  Virtually any merge algo is a weave in a trench coat, so yes, weaves always return. In Beagle, that is more explicit: diff, merge, blame are all weave based

  https://github.com/gritzko/beagle/blob/main/graf/WEAVE.h

• Sp.h is the standard library that C deserves
  5 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 23 May 2026

  I use a C dialect with (ptr,ptr) slices and (ptr,ptr,ptr,ptr) buffers. Effectively a different programming language, still uses standard C compiler.

  https://github.com/gritzko/libabc

  In this day and age, the top problem is Claude bringing lots and lots of bad C into the code base. Takes a weekend to clear the week's mess.

  https://github.com/gritzko/beagle

  In a cleared codebase though all the usual C memory bugs are virtually non-existant. When did I see core dump last time? I do not remember. Thus feel no urge to use Zig or Rust.

• I Will Not Add Query Strings to Your URLs
  11 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 May 2026

  how does adding the word blob in the url help with that?

  i don't think it makes a difference here.

  in fact compare these urls:

  https://github.com/gritzko/beagle/blob/a7e172/VERBS.md

  https://github.com/gritzko/beagle/raw/a7e172/VERBS.md

  https://github.com/gritzko/beagle/commit/a7e172/VERBS.md

  turns out that "blob", "raw" and "commit" have nothing to do with the hash itself, but are functions to describe how the object in question is to be presented. so what i said above about blob being redundant is false, the problem is rather that it is in a weird place. it should be at the end, like a kind of extension because it signifies the format of the output. except i think putting it at the end makes handling relative paths more difficult as it would have to be appended to every link to other files.

  the roxen webserver has an interesting solution for that. they call it prestates and it's placed at the beginning of a url: https://github.com/(commit)/gritzko/beagle/a7e172/VERBS.md . it sets the format value visually apart, and you could have multiple prestate values separated by a comma. i have used that feature extensively on my own sites. i even expanded on the concept in custom modules.

• Spot – Git repo code search, replace, diff and merge
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 29 Mar 2026
• Lies I was told about collaborative editing, Part 2: Why we don't use Yjs
  13 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Mar 2026

  One way to minimize impedance mismatch is to work with DOM-like or JSON-like structures mostly immune to transient bugs, which I am doing currently in the librdx project. It has full-CRDT RDX format[1] and essentially-JSON BASON[2] format. It does not solve all the problems, more like the set of problems is different. On the good side, it is really difficult to break. On the bad side, it lacks some of the rigor (esp BASON) that mature CRDT models have. But, those models are way more complex and, most likely, will have mismatching bugs in different implementations. No free lunch.

  [1]: https://github.com/gritzko/librdx/tree/master/rdx

• Beagle, a source code management system that stores AST trees
  2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Mar 2026
• Sem – Semantic version control. Entity-level diffs on top of Git
  3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Mar 2026

  Was "sem" named "graft" last week and "got" a week before that? Everyone is vibing so hard it is difficult to keep track of things.

  Still, my two cents: Beagle the AST-level version control system, experimental

  https://github.com/gritzko/librdx/tree/master/be#readme

  It genuinely stores AST trees in (virtually any) key-value database (RocksDB at the moment). In fact, it is a versioned database for the code with very open format and complete freedom to build on top of it.

• Ki Editor
  9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 7 Mar 2026

  I am working on AST based revision control. I have a stack of ideas on how to achieve the same Ctrl+W effect with commits/diffs/cherry-picks. All still in flux. In case you have insights, please share!

  [1]: https://github.com/gritzko/librdx/tree/master/be#readme

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