got

• tough call to ake, but i'm pausing this project for now. I hope i can come back to it later. I made se3veral mistakes in working on this, the most significant being that i did not write unit tests as i progressed. i also made it much bigger than i planned. now, i have other things im working on, and i find those things more interesting at the moment, and less strenous. again, i hope to return to this later. but i decided that an incomplete project is not necessarily a failed one*

got

a minimal git client in go. It uses no other dependency other than assert for testing. Everything else is from the go standard library I implement algorithms like crc, myer's diff, x-delta, and the git protocol (http and ssh) from scratch. I took testing and error handling a little seriously for a side project, mostly because I wanted to learn how tose things work in go. I also witched from go 1.6 to go 1.18beta to take advantage of the new generics introduced in go. The two major things i wwish go had, compared to rust are iterators and macros, now that go has generics

In implementing this client, I used only one external package. I'm a Go developer interested in learning how things work at the lower level. I'm especially interested in network protocols and distributed systems. If you're looking at this anywhere in the world, please check the code out and see if there are design or implementatioon changes I could make to improve it. I would love to learn from you. I did well to read Effective Go several times over to check the quality of the code, but surely there are places where I could make it better. This client is not for production use, as it would fail you in so many ways. You may use it to learn, however. Hack on it, submit PRs, hopefully we can have fun together. For devs who wish to learn from this implementation, I made the code quite readable, and punctuated it heavily with comments. It shouldn't be hard to find your way around it. If you need help, please let me know by raising an issue. This [tutorial] () explains how I implemented it. I made it a series because I wanted to go into great detail.

Special thanks to the following people, without whom I would've been unable to make this happen:

• The Pro-Git book authors For a good understanding of how git works internally, nothing is better than Pro-Git's internals chapter
• Ben Hoyt Before implementing this client, the first thing I did after reading the internals chapter of the book was to read through Bens Python solution. Whenever I got stuck (and that was more than a few times), I looked again at how Ben did it in Python. Thanks a great deal!
• James Coglans blog is a goldmine! I stumbled on his blog while reading an article about Rust. It turns out that he implemented a sound git client in Ruby and posted explanations of key problems he solved. I read and internalised his detailed explanation of diffs. Thank you James! -Ben Johnson is another guy whose blog I stumbled upon while writing this project. His articles are not about git. They're about go. He made them clear, precise, and easily digestible. I found myself going back to the finished parts of the code to restructure, optimize, and use better go idioms. Check it out his walkthroughs
• mincong mingcong explained the index file in a superb way. Thanks! -ChimeraCoder wrote a git client at the recurse center

TODO

• Allow Branching
• Allow adding of deeper-nested files
• Write unit tests for all plumbers
• make asynchronous