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I'm exciting about this too. It becoming more like a protocol makes me optimistic we'll see binary diff API points based on the rsync algorithm.

fun fact: Dropbox internally used rsync binary diff to quickly upload small changes to large file. I assume they still do. But their public API endpoints don't offer this and a small change to a large file means the whole file must be updated.

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I implemented rsync's binary diff/patch in .NET several years ago: https://github.com/zmj/rsync-delta

It's a decent protocol, but it has shortcomings. I'd expect most future use cases for that kind of thing to reach for a content-defined chunking algorithm tuned towards their common file formats and sizes.

> binary diff API points based on the rsync algorithm

Now that's an idea I never considered. Nice.

Now consider applying it to git. How about clean semantic diffs to your .xlsx files? To your .PNG files?

...that's rather a different question, I think. Rsync doesn't claim to use a semantic diff.

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