Grit

A high-performance Git implementation in Rust with both plumbing and porcelain commands.

Features

• Hybrid Architecture: Plumbing and porcelain commands
• High Performance: 2-3x faster with caching and parallelism
• Git Compatible: Full Git repository and format compatibility
• Ignore Support: Respects .gritignore for file exclusion

Why Grit?

Grit is designed for speed. By leveraging Rust's zero-cost abstractions and aggressive LRU caching, Grit significantly outperforms standard Git in micro-benchmarks for small to medium repositories.

Performance Benchmarks

Command	Grit Time	Git Time	Speedup
init	~2.1 ms	~8.6 ms	~4.1x
add	~4.1 ms	~14.0 ms	~3.4x
status	~5.4 ms	~17.8 ms	~3.3x
commit	~6.0 ms	~25.2 ms	~4.2x

Benchmarks ran on a Macbook M3 Max. Click here to see the code.

Installation

cargo install --path .

Quick Start

# Initialize a repository
grit init

# Stage and commit files
grit add .
grit status
grit commit -m "Initial commit"

# View history
grit log --oneline

Commands

Porcelain (User-Friendly)

• grit init - Initialize repository
• grit add <files> - Stage files for commit
• grit status - Show working directory status
• grit commit -m <msg> - Create commit
• grit log - Show commit history
• grit reset - Reset to previous state
• grit diff - Show changes between commits

Plumbing (Low-Level)

• grit hash-object <file> - Store file in object database
• grit cat-file -p <hash> - Display object content
• grit write-tree - Create tree from index
• grit checkout <hash> - Restore working directory

Ignoring Files

Grit supports .gritignore files to exclude files from staging and status output. Create a .gritignore file in your repository root:

# Ignore temporary files
*.tmp
*.log

# Ignore build directories
build/
target/

# Ignore specific files
secret.txt

Documentation

To learn more about Grit's architecture and API, generate and view the documentation with:

cargo doc --open