Readit NewsWhich is especially funny as using go-git (which is known to be slow) and shelling out to git are apt to bring even greater performance overhead. As always, don't assume – measure!, but if we have to play the odds for the sake of an internet comment, libgit2 is likely to be the most performant option reasonably available, if there is some reason to think that performance is of concern here.
Added complexity in compiling is a tradeoff to consider, of course, but "bad idea" is also nonsense there. It requires a different set of priorities, but those priorities may very well be exactly what a project needs. — And maybe not even. The earlier comment brought a lot of assumptions without offering any background. There are theoretically other options available for libgit2. For example, using the Wasm build. While others have had success using Zig as the C-side compiler, which doesn't have all the messy baggage legacy compilers tend to carry (e.g. poor cross-compilation support).
Yes, measurement may offer reason why those are not suitable options, but missing in the comment is the measurement, or even what is trying to be measured! Instead, we got something that appears to be copy and pasted straight from a Rust advertisement.
Yes, there are cases in which CGo’s tradeoffs are appropriate, but you’re rebutting my claim that CGo is a bad default, so you need to show that CGo is appropriate in the default case (you went so far as to call it “nonsense”), not merely that there exists some project for which CGo’s tradeoffs are appropriate.
How do you define significant? It is noticeable as compared to C. It is nothing compared to Python.
> Are there any benchmarks on this?
You will see an additional ~20ns per call (assuming the gc compiler; tinygo, for example, can call C functions as fast as C can). In other words, you're not ever going to notice unless you're making millions of calls in a hot loop. The bigger problem in a highly concurrent environment is that blocking C functions can start to mess with the scheduler if they are slow to return. You, again, would never notice in a program of this nature, though. The feature is there to be use. It being a "bad idea" is nonsense.
Some added pain in compilation is, fairly, a tradeoff to consider. But that's just because C compilers, for the most part, aren't very good. It is not like those problems go away if you use C instead.
The bad idea claim was principally about breaking cross and static compilation.
Someone mentioned https://github.com/go-git/go-git. I would have definitely used it unless there are better alternatives. If - as someone who claimed - it turns out it is slow, I would have created my own bindings to libgit2 still, most likely.
I'm interested in feedback from the HN community.
I’m getting a bit of a macro fatigue in Rust. In my humble opinion the less “magic” you use in the codebase, the better. Error enums are fine. You can make them as fine-grained as makes sense in your codebase, and they end up representing a kind of an error tree. I much prefer this easy to grok way to what’s described in the article. I mean, there’s enough things to think about in the codebase, I don’t want to spend mental energy on thinking about a fancy way to represent errors.
Would you like more information about how to identify AI comments? (kidding)