Yostivanich

Thanks to Hacker News for the link to a mail­ing list on Java Git vs. pure C Git:

So. Yes, its prac­ti­cal to build Git in a higher level lan­guage, but you just can’t get the same per­for­mance, or tight mem­ory uti­liza­tion, that C Git gets. That’s what that higher level lan­guage abstrac­tion costs you. But, JGit per­forms rea­son­ably well; well enough that we use inter­nally at Google as a git server.

I’ll add that while I under­stand and real­ize that PHP is a slower lan­guage than oth­ers the time to build an appli­ca­tion for me is more impor­tant most often than the com­pu­ta­tion time of the pro­gram. In the same sense that even Google rec­og­nizes that JGit is slower then C Git, it’s not enough of a dif­fer­ence to mat­ter, most often the speed dif­fer­ence doesn’t really mat­ter when it’s so easy and cheap to throw hard­ware at the prob­lem.