Chris Dickinson on how to implement Git in Rust

2 min read

Chris Dickinson, a developer working on implementing Git in Rust shared updates on his project Git-rs. This is his second try over the same project. He writes, “I’m trying again this year after reading more of “Programming Rust” (Blandy, Orendorff).”

Dickinson has maintained a ‘To Do’ list wherein he has written the steps right from reading the objects from loose store to creating a packfile and publishing it to crates. You can checkout his full project for his day-by-day updates.

It is also quite interesting to see how developers are sharing their projects on Git and learning something new on a daily basis based on their experience.

Users are overall happy to see Dickinson’s contribution. A user commented on Reddit, “Maybe everybody is happy just to use this as a personal learning experience for now, but I think there will be a lot of interest in a shared project eventually.”

Users are also sharing their experiences from their own projects. A user commented on HackerNews, “I love to see people reimplementing existing tools on their own, because I find that to be a great way to learn more about those tools. I started on a Git implementation in Rust as well, though I haven’t worked on it in a while.”

Why work with Rust?

Rust has been gaining tremendous popularity in recent times. Steve Klabnik, a popular blogger/developer shares his experiences working with Rust and how the language has outgrown him. He writes in his blog post, “I’m the only person who has been to every Rust conference in existence so far. I went to RustCamp, all three RustConfs, all five RustFests so far, all three Rust Belt Rusts. One RustRush. Am I forgetting any? Thirteen Rust conferences in the past four years.”

He further adds, “ I’m starting to get used to hearing “oh yeah our team has been using Rust in production for a while now, it’s great.” The first time that happened, it felt very strange. Exciting, but strange. I wonder what the next stage of Rust’s growth will feel like.”

Rust is also in the top fifteen (by the number of pull requests) as of 2018 in the GitHub Octoverse report. Moreover, according to the Go User Survey 2018, 19% of the respondents ranked it as a top preferred language which indicates a high level of interest in Rust among this audience.

Last month, the team at Rust announced the stable release, Rust 1.33.0. This release brought improvements to const fns, compiler, and libraries. Last week, the Rust community organized the Rust Latam 2019 Conference at Montevideo for the Rust community. It involved 200+ Rust developers and enthusiasts from the world.