Hacker News Reader

Does this mean rewriting Magit to use libgit2 FFI bindings[0] rather than subprocess calls would lead to significant speedups?

[0]: https://github.com/emacsorphanage/libegit2

View on HN

Maybe, but I wouldn't hold my breath. It's more about how much data needs to be fetched and how many calls have to be made to fetch it. With Maigt, it sometimes feel like a select-in-loop anti-pattern. I.e. Git only exposes information in certain slices from its database. It's hard to run free-form queries on it. Often, Magit wants to display something that cannot be phrased as a single query, so it needs to do multiple. These queries also cannot be made concurrently, or even if they could be, the concurrency overhead would've been too much.

So, using the library will remove the overhead of exec() and friends, and will definitely make the situation better, but the ultimate solution is either for Git to be more like SQL database, or for Magit to extract information directly from the Git database, rather than go through the API (but the choice of Emacs Lisp for this functionality would be highly questionable).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com