> In looking at the code that the LLMs have produced for the project, especially given the pretty massive and widespread architectural changes needed to make the implementation libified and memory safe, we decided that the codebase is not a derivative work that would require carrying forward the GPL license and have decided to release the code under the MIT instead.
I have been working on the same problem in other areas. My ultimate goal is to rewrite nginx in Rust passing as much as the upstream tests as possible while leveraging the strongest aspects of Ruts ecosystem - i.e. rustls (modern memory safe OpenSSL), Tokio (async runtime), h2 (http 2 impl) rather than implementing from scratch like the upstream. I started with Lua, then porting over Valkey, and now working on nginx. The reason was because I wanted to learn the ins and outs before taking on the most complex portion.
Happy to answer any questions on the approach! When I started a few weeks ago the harnesses on their own were not good enough to get very far without a "meta harness" of sorts but that is changing largely with Claude Workloads and Mythos. A lot of the work is developing some custom tooling to move these along faster.
> A pretty fun experiment and I think we can shape this into something truly useful to the whole community.
Agree with first half of this sentence, we should all have fun with experiments.
> It was never based on a linkable and reentrant library, but instead on a "Unix" philosophy of chaining together simpler commands, which means that it's difficult to use
> It was never based on a linkable and reentrant library, but instead on a "Unix" philosophy of chaining together simpler commands, which means that it's difficult to use it in long running processes without fork/exec overhead for everything.
I'd be really interested in the opposite, just for the sake of experimentation since that's what these projects mostly are. They all seem to be rewrites for the sake of "performance", because the cost is now lower bc of AI. I'd be interested to see something like a port of Quake III in Python or Kubernetes in Perl, even Rails in Python would be goofy and really fun to see
This is coming from a cofounder at github, someone who probably knows precisely what the GPL is for. Whatever the legal merits, building on a GPL3 project's complete test suite and relicensing under MIT is not acting in good faith toward the original authors. I really find it disgusting and it makes me want to avoid gitbutler entirely.
What’s the long term strategy for this code base? Does the author expect community code contribution or just bug reports or maybe just test contributions?
they still haven't explained why I should bother. Is it faster, easier, more efficient, more capable, more scalable on large codebases, supports better workflows?
In fact, I would rather it stay C for 15 more years.
> the result is Grit, a from-scratch, library-based, memory-safe, idiomatic Rust reimplentation of Git that passes over 99% of the entire Git test suite.
Why not 100%?
> It's not actually passing every single test, though that is on purpose. I did mark some parts of the testing suite as "skipped" because I don't think it's worth recreating them in a library like this
> 41,715 / 42,001 tests passing (99.3%)
So it is not entire then but somehow that was worth burning $8,000~ dollars worth of tokens?
There is often good reasons for these purposeful digressions. I.e. in nginx the unit tests cover cyphers that are considered unsafe and not supported by modern libraries like rustls https://github.com/rustls/rustls. It is reasonable to make a new implementation and leave behind a bit of baggage.
I think we are talking about ROI in terms of solving real world problems and making real impact, not the fact that a tool has been ported from language X to language Y.
The article starts out with paragraphs about the history and motivation.
> it made me wonder about the feasibility of using that same approach to accomplish something I've been dreaming about for 15 years now,
> which means that it's difficult to use it in long running processes without fork/exec overhead for everything.
> What if we used the same basic idea that Anthropic used on their from-scratch C compiler? Start a brand new implementation, design it as a Rust library, then throw a swarm of agents at the problem
> One of the main things I would like to be able to use it for is to be able to bundle complex push/fetch functionality into GitButler and other standalone Git tools needing network functionality (such as Jujutsu).
> Having parts of Git as discrete, embeddable slices of library also enables things like building custom Git servers or client functionality in Rust.
> The full build of all Git functionality in Rust is currently around 27M, but since a large part of it is a library, it could clearly be easily split up into domains of functionality - subcrates that do specific things. Perhaps you could simply use the subset you need.
Given the author already admitted that the implementation was slow anyway, you are no better off of using gitoxide instead and that has support for Windows where-as Grit does not.
> Currently both Gitoxide and libgit2's networking functionality is either partial, slow or non-existant. Both GitButler and Jujutsu rely on forking out to Git in order to push or pull data. A big reason for this is the incredibly complicated credential logic involved, but all of this is (theoretically) currently covered in Grit.
It depends whether the 0.7% failures are testing deliberately unimplemented features like email or is in corner cases in implemented features. It sounds like it's at least mostly the former, hopefully it's 100% the former.
I don't care if any git I use has email features. IIUC, even most of the people that use git with email don't directly use the email features, they use the patch set features like `git am`. I expect `git am` to work, I don't expect git to actually do email.
> In looking at the code that the LLMs have produced for the project, especially given the pretty massive and widespread architectural changes needed to make the implementation libified and memory safe, we decided that the codebase is not a derivative work that would require carrying forward the GPL license and have decided to release the code under the MIT instead.
Hmm. That's going to be interesting.
they would be just wrong. I hope someone with standing sues
I have been working on the same problem in other areas. My ultimate goal is to rewrite nginx in Rust passing as much as the upstream tests as possible while leveraging the strongest aspects of Ruts ecosystem - i.e. rustls (modern memory safe OpenSSL), Tokio (async runtime), h2 (http 2 impl) rather than implementing from scratch like the upstream. I started with Lua, then porting over Valkey, and now working on nginx. The reason was because I wanted to learn the ins and outs before taking on the most complex portion.
[1]. https://github.com/ianm199/lua-rs/tree/main Lua
[2]. https://github.com/ianm199/valdr Valkey/ Redis
[3]. https://github.com/ianm199/nginx-rs-port nginx
Happy to answer any questions on the approach! When I started a few weeks ago the harnesses on their own were not good enough to get very far without a "meta harness" of sorts but that is changing largely with Claude Workloads and Mythos. A lot of the work is developing some custom tooling to move these along faster.
> A pretty fun experiment and I think we can shape this into something truly useful to the whole community.
Agree with first half of this sentence, we should all have fun with experiments.
> It was never based on a linkable and reentrant library, but instead on a "Unix" philosophy of chaining together simpler commands, which means that it's difficult to use
Ahhh now we have philosophical disagreement in the only place in the entire article that says "why". Unix is a feature, it's arguably more important in current time: https://aperocky.com/blog/post.html?slug=unix-philosophy-age...
You cut that citation conveniently short.
> It was never based on a linkable and reentrant library, but instead on a "Unix" philosophy of chaining together simpler commands, which means that it's difficult to use it in long running processes without fork/exec overhead for everything.
I'd be really interested in the opposite, just for the sake of experimentation since that's what these projects mostly are. They all seem to be rewrites for the sake of "performance", because the cost is now lower bc of AI. I'd be interested to see something like a port of Quake III in Python or Kubernetes in Perl, even Rails in Python would be goofy and really fun to see
> Quake III in Python
Probably doable - I remember most of Natural Selection 2 was Lua and it's more than a decade old at this point.
So, they "decided" it's not a derivative and thus can be listened under MIT instead of GPL....
Yeah, that's usually how contracts work.
You decide whether you have followed it or not. The other party will decide if they agree. If in dispute, you go to a judge and they decide also.
a lot of things are just "decided" really.
it's just in this case it's the author. we'll have to wait and see who decides to challenge it
This is coming from a cofounder at github, someone who probably knows precisely what the GPL is for. Whatever the legal merits, building on a GPL3 project's complete test suite and relicensing under MIT is not acting in good faith toward the original authors. I really find it disgusting and it makes me want to avoid gitbutler entirely.
What’s the long term strategy for this code base? Does the author expect community code contribution or just bug reports or maybe just test contributions?
In 6 months, seeing no adoption, move the repo to maintenance mode. Archive in 12 months.
Does anyone plan to use this?
Similarly, is there any momentum left for Cloudflare's EmDash? I can barely find any discussion after April.
they still haven't explained why I should bother. Is it faster, easier, more efficient, more capable, more scalable on large codebases, supports better workflows?
In fact, I would rather it stay C for 15 more years.
> the result is Grit, a from-scratch, library-based, memory-safe, idiomatic Rust reimplentation of Git that passes over 99% of the entire Git test suite.
Why not 100%?
> It's not actually passing every single test, though that is on purpose. I did mark some parts of the testing suite as "skipped" because I don't think it's worth recreating them in a library like this
> 41,715 / 42,001 tests passing (99.3%)
So it is not entire then but somehow that was worth burning $8,000~ dollars worth of tokens?
There is often good reasons for these purposeful digressions. I.e. in nginx the unit tests cover cyphers that are considered unsafe and not supported by modern libraries like rustls https://github.com/rustls/rustls. It is reasonable to make a new implementation and leave behind a bit of baggage.
So .7% tests fail therefor it was 100% a waste of time?
I think we are talking about ROI in terms of solving real world problems and making real impact, not the fact that a tool has been ported from language X to language Y.
Regardless, what's the point?
The article starts out with paragraphs about the history and motivation.
> it made me wonder about the feasibility of using that same approach to accomplish something I've been dreaming about for 15 years now,
> which means that it's difficult to use it in long running processes without fork/exec overhead for everything.
> What if we used the same basic idea that Anthropic used on their from-scratch C compiler? Start a brand new implementation, design it as a Rust library, then throw a swarm of agents at the problem
> One of the main things I would like to be able to use it for is to be able to bundle complex push/fetch functionality into GitButler and other standalone Git tools needing network functionality (such as Jujutsu).
> Having parts of Git as discrete, embeddable slices of library also enables things like building custom Git servers or client functionality in Rust.
> The full build of all Git functionality in Rust is currently around 27M, but since a large part of it is a library, it could clearly be easily split up into domains of functionality - subcrates that do specific things. Perhaps you could simply use the subset you need.
maybe it's an academic project. proof they could reimplement something useful & complex?
Given the author already admitted that the implementation was slow anyway, you are no better off of using gitoxide instead and that has support for Windows where-as Grit does not.
> Currently both Gitoxide and libgit2's networking functionality is either partial, slow or non-existant. Both GitButler and Jujutsu rely on forking out to Git in order to push or pull data. A big reason for this is the incredibly complicated credential logic involved, but all of this is (theoretically) currently covered in Grit.
It depends whether the 0.7% failures are testing deliberately unimplemented features like email or is in corner cases in implemented features. It sounds like it's at least mostly the former, hopefully it's 100% the former.
I don't care if any git I use has email features. IIUC, even most of the people that use git with email don't directly use the email features, they use the patch set features like `git am`. I expect `git am` to work, I don't expect git to actually do email.