I did check this out. The shell, perl and python are likely for scripting and not used during runtime. TCL is likely some form of dynamic scripting.

I think we also have to be honest about what the project here is too, it's not to have both C and Rust together, but to replace all C with Rust. In which case, it probably makes sense to just clone to repo and work on a fork like they did with SSH.

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rbehrends 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> The shell, perl and python are likely for scripting and not used during runtime.

Some git subcommands are implemented in these. git filter-branch is a shell script, git cvsimport is a Perl script, and git p4 (perforce interop) is a Python script. There are not too many left these days (git add -p/-i also used to call a Perl script), but they exist.

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tankenmate 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm sure you are aware, reading between the lines of what you said, why, but for some others who aren't aware of the history of git; it was originally about 50% C and 50% Perl, the performance critical parts were written in C and then various git commands were written in Perl. Over time almost all the Perl was removed because there were less Perl monks than C devs.

Now it would seem the logic is reversed; even though there are less Rust devs than C devs, Rust is going to replace C. Maybe now that git is large enough and entrenched enough such a move can be forced through.

	▲	cesarb 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		> it was originally about 50% C and 50% Perl, the performance critical parts were written in C and then various git commands were written in Perl. IIRC, it was mostly shell, not Perl, and looking at the proportion is misleading: the low-level commands (the "plumbing") like git-cat-file or git-commit-tree were all in C, while the more user-friendly commands (the "porcelain") like git-log or git-commit were all shell scripts calling the low-level commands. Yes, even things we consider fundamental today like "git commit" were shell scripts.

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mook 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I believe gitk and git-gui are written in tcl. Those are definitely things that get shipped to the user, so (at least for those parts) you wouldn't need to have a toolchain on the build server.

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rascul 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

A number of the git commands were implemented in perl and shell. Now I see only git-svn is perl here for me and there's still a few shell scripts in /usr/libexec/git.