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Show HN: Go-git – low-level and extensible Git client library in Go

114 points by mcuadros 11y ago

goda90 11y ago
Missed the opportunity for word play from the get-go.
- jerf 11y ago
  "go-git" is already wordplay on the commonly-used "go get" command.
  - stcredzero 11y ago
    And "go get" is already wordplay.
mrdrozdov 11y ago
Reminds me of `gitgo` https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gitgo https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gitgo
- mcuadros 11y ago
  Yep is a very similar approach, I'm not familiar with gitgo, but we started to work on go-git before gitgo was published, so this is the reason why we have our own project instead of collaborating on a existing one.
xiaq 11y ago
Golang is the new JavaScript: everything that can be rewritten with it will be :)
- thebouv 11y ago
  Not sure I see that as a bad thing. When learning a new language for a real problem, I'll go back to things I've written before and rewrite them in the new language. The core logic is already figured out, so the exercise helps me match up constructs and try to apply the new language idiomatically. Then I can go back to my original problem with more ideas about how to use the new language effectively. Plus, it's fun.
- donatj 11y ago
  Go's lexical scoping and first class function/method's owe a lot to JS for leading the way IMHO. That said, it's "object" system is almost the complete reverse. JS is methods with data, Go is data with methods. It's an interesting contrast.
  - xdc55 11y ago
    Javascript leading the way? What are you talking about? First class functions is a concept from mathematics and many programming languages had this feature way before javascript existed, and I simply don't understand exactly what concept of Go's lexical scoping resembles anything exclusive of javascript. I don't understand the last paragraphs about methods with data and data with methods, but Go's structs resembles C's structs, binding methods to a struct is an thing I've only seen in Go, but maybe some other programming language had this before.
    - jerf 11y ago
      IIRC, the only difference in C++ between a struct and a class is the default visibility, and maybe some other bizarre quirky corner case or two. Despite it technically not being in the Go lingo (the word "object" only appears once in the entire Go spec, and that's referring to composing arrays/slices together to get multi-dimensional arrays/slices), I generally don't kick myself too hard for referring to things in Go as "objects". They are. Sure, officially they're "structs with methods" (method is the official term), but given the diversity of other things the term "object" is applied to that's plenty close enough for me.
    - danieldk 11y ago
      Go's structs resembles C's structs, binding methods to a struct is an thing I've only seen in Go, but maybe some other programming language had this before. Oberon, probably others: http://www.excelsior-usa.com/doc/xds/o2rep.html http://www.excelsior-usa.com/doc/xds/o2rep.html
  - hellofunk 11y ago
    First class functions and lexical scoping have been actively used in programming languages since 4 decades prior to the invention of JS.
- insertnickname 11y ago
  This happens with every language, it's not particular to Go or JavaScript.
  - melling 11y ago
    Yes, it's a sign of maturity to many developers, many of whom won't touch a language until there are hundreds of libraries, etc for everything. Marco Arment was ranting on his podcast that's it's better to use PHP over Go, for example, because there's so much more support. https://www.relay.fm/radar/14 https://www.relay.fm/radar/14
    - JBReefer 11y ago
      A language isn't useful, to me, unless there's an Excel format reader/writer and a popular web framework with SO answers. Novel is not useful when you work in Enterprise software.
- brudgers 11y ago
  Golang is the new Java. Google designed it for legions of corporate systems coders. It is ultimately destined to be seen as the enterprise language that it is [twenty years ago all the cool kids loved Java]. Google policy is no map function for you, it's just more palatable to bake it into the language than an HR document...it's still pure policy steeped in pointy haired logic. Don't get me wrong, it's better than it could be: at least it doesn't have something equivalent to UML diagrams. But it's still a corporate policy. It just feels refreshing because...wait for it...it brings garbage collection to C++ programmers. And where have we heard that before?
  - xiaq 11y ago
    Golang is no more a Google language than Unix is an AT&T OS. And why are "corporate languages" necessarily bad?
    - brudgers 11y ago
      On the one hand, I was responding to the Atwood's law reference. On the other hand, I have become interested in the way corporations use open-source as a strategy and implement that strategy tactically via sort of "basic fighter maneuvers" energy management discipline. [1] Incipient potential competitors who adopt Go draw a dependency on Google because for all practical purposes, Google will determine the direction of Go: it's core team works there. And incipient potential competitors have radically different needs. We can differ in opinion upon whether Unix was seen an ATT operating system. For me the legal and licensing histories suggests that it was in a strong sense and the "Open" and "Free" and "Li___" are the heritage. YMMV. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_fighter_maneuvers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_fighter_maneuvers
      - EvanPlaice 11y ago
        Go is an incremental improvement over the C++ ecosystem without all the legacy baggage. By controling the platform, Google can leverage the ecosystem to attract and cherry-pick early adopters to the language. Once the language becomes populat enough that the Enterprise starts to adopt it, Google will already be onto their next 'ground breaking' technology. Once people settle on a perception they tend to hold on to it for life. One day soon people won't want to use Java. It'll be seen as "our Dad's language". Steve Yegge (ie now a Googler) said as much during his OSCON 2007 talk. The value isn't in the language/platform, it's the people who adopt/build/use it. Microsoft knows this, developers are what kept them afloat during a decade of stagnation in product development. Oracle thought they could buy their way in by acquiring Sun; except, while they were busy suing Google, Amazon sprinted ahead of the pack with their cloud services platform. This is how the biggest players make long-term investments. Guarantee an abundant stream of top tier talent and success will follow.
- masklinn 11y ago
  That kinda sorta makes sense given the feeling that "cgo is not go" (http://dave.cheney.net/2016/01/18/cgo-is-not-go http://dave.cheney.net/2016/01/18/cgo-is-not-go). Without cgo no FFI, without FFI you have to reimplement whatever you need in the host language.
Gurrewe 11y ago
Oh, so this is how Tyba found me. Cool stuff! Is there a way to see what information sourced has about yourself?
- eisokant 11y ago
  Hi Gustav! It is, all though these days we're named source{d}. We're working on some very cool visualisations to release later this year that allow you to dig in on all of the insights we've learned from your code. Right now there is no way yet, we're completely emerged on focusing on improving our backend (and doing some very cool stuff around deep learning to analyse your code). I'll keep you posted once we release.
patrickg 11y ago
Shameless plug: https://github.com/speedata/gogit https://github.com/speedata/gogit (I use that one with a 300 Gig repository) Edit: this is the backend used in https://ctanmirror.speedata.de/ https://ctanmirror.speedata.de/ a "travel back in time" archive of CTAN (back to 2013-03-17, IIRC)
zwerdlds 11y ago
Marginal, but, not to be confused with Gogs/Gogits: https://github.com/gogits/gogs https://github.com/gogits/gogs
toni 11y ago
So a while back I was cold-emailed by a recruiter at source{d} (the makers of this library). He wrote that after analyzing my Github profile, he has a great opportunity for me in Country A. I responded back by sending him my private phone number and showing interest in talking to him about this opportunity on the phone. Usually At this point, serious recruiters will do call you. But instead, he wrote that before going any further, he would like to ask me "a couple of quick questions" and requested if I could email him back my answers. The kind of questions I was supposed to answer were pretty amusing: for example, one of the questions involved telling "If I live near Country A." But he could easily find this out by looking at the country code of the phone number I just gave him in the previous email. My location is also public on my Github profile, so he could have easily found out that I live in Country B. which is around an hour away from Country A. The rest of the questions were also showing the recruiter's minimal knowledge of my actual Github profile. At this point it was pretty evident that I was corresponding with a bot. They were running different set of algorithms against different set of people, trying to analyze the results.
- eisokant 11y ago
  Hey Toni, Founder of source{d} here. First of all my apologies for the bad experience. This should have not happened. We're a team of developers ourselves (no recruiters) working on making sure that these kind of situations don't happen to any developer (we started this because we were fed up with the bad practices in recruitment). We're definitely not a bot, I can promise you this. Every email gets read by a developer themselves (our team: http://sourced.tech/about http://sourced.tech/about) and personally answered. If you send me an email (eiso@sourced.tech) I'll personally figure out what happened here.
  - stevekemp 11y ago
    FWIW I've also had what felt very much like automated mails from your company. I've started marking them as spam after the first two.
    - orf 11y ago
shazow 11y ago
Here's one more while we're at it: https://src.sourcegraph.com/go-git https://src.sourcegraph.com/go-git This one is a fork of gogs' git implementation that I worked on briefly.
dh997 11y ago
I once had a cold-call recruiter tell me Go was worthless. I asked the recruiter to never call me again and hung up. People whom are both disrespectful and unable to see where their hockey puck sports analogies will be later on have marginal utility and are likely liabilities... don't get involved with those sorts.
stephenr 11y ago
What are the chances someone could use this to build a tool to provide structured output for git commands. SVN had the --xml flag for pretty much every command, allowing for 100% parseable output, with git ( in particular git log) there is no 100% solution - the best you can do is use --pretty=format and create delimiters you hope aren't used in the commit message (or author names/emails, etc) itself. The output doesn't have to be XML. JSON or even escaped CSV would be fine.

114 points by mcuadros 11y ago

goda90 11y ago

Missed the opportunity for word play from the get-go.

jerf 11y ago
"go-git" is already wordplay on the commonly-used "go get" command.
- stcredzero 11y ago
  And "go get" is already wordplay.

mrdrozdov 11y ago

Reminds me of `gitgo` https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gitgo https://github.com/ChimeraCoder/gitgo

mcuadros 11y ago
Yep is a very similar approach, I'm not familiar with gitgo, but we started to work on go-git before gitgo was published, so this is the reason why we have our own project instead of collaborating on a existing one.

xiaq 11y ago

Golang is the new JavaScript: everything that can be rewritten with it will be :)

thebouv 11y ago
Not sure I see that as a bad thing. When learning a new language for a real problem, I'll go back to things I've written before and rewrite them in the new language. The core logic is already figured out, so the exercise helps me match up constructs and try to apply the new language idiomatically. Then I can go back to my original problem with more ideas about how to use the new language effectively. Plus, it's fun.
donatj 11y ago
Go's lexical scoping and first class function/method's owe a lot to JS for leading the way IMHO. That said, it's "object" system is almost the complete reverse. JS is methods with data, Go is data with methods. It's an interesting contrast.
- xdc55 11y ago
  Javascript leading the way? What are you talking about? First class functions is a concept from mathematics and many programming languages had this feature way before javascript existed, and I simply don't understand exactly what concept of Go's lexical scoping resembles anything exclusive of javascript. I don't understand the last paragraphs about methods with data and data with methods, but Go's structs resembles C's structs, binding methods to a struct is an thing I've only seen in Go, but maybe some other programming language had this before.
  - jerf 11y ago
    IIRC, the only difference in C++ between a struct and a class is the default visibility, and maybe some other bizarre quirky corner case or two. Despite it technically not being in the Go lingo (the word "object" only appears once in the entire Go spec, and that's referring to composing arrays/slices together to get multi-dimensional arrays/slices), I generally don't kick myself too hard for referring to things in Go as "objects". They are. Sure, officially they're "structs with methods" (method is the official term), but given the diversity of other things the term "object" is applied to that's plenty close enough for me.
  - danieldk 11y ago
    Go's structs resembles C's structs, binding methods to a struct is an thing I've only seen in Go, but maybe some other programming language had this before. Oberon, probably others: http://www.excelsior-usa.com/doc/xds/o2rep.html http://www.excelsior-usa.com/doc/xds/o2rep.html
- hellofunk 11y ago
  First class functions and lexical scoping have been actively used in programming languages since 4 decades prior to the invention of JS.
insertnickname 11y ago
This happens with every language, it's not particular to Go or JavaScript.
- melling 11y ago
  Yes, it's a sign of maturity to many developers, many of whom won't touch a language until there are hundreds of libraries, etc for everything. Marco Arment was ranting on his podcast that's it's better to use PHP over Go, for example, because there's so much more support. https://www.relay.fm/radar/14 https://www.relay.fm/radar/14
  - JBReefer 11y ago
    A language isn't useful, to me, unless there's an Excel format reader/writer and a popular web framework with SO answers. Novel is not useful when you work in Enterprise software.
brudgers 11y ago
Golang is the new Java. Google designed it for legions of corporate systems coders. It is ultimately destined to be seen as the enterprise language that it is [twenty years ago all the cool kids loved Java]. Google policy is no map function for you, it's just more palatable to bake it into the language than an HR document...it's still pure policy steeped in pointy haired logic. Don't get me wrong, it's better than it could be: at least it doesn't have something equivalent to UML diagrams. But it's still a corporate policy. It just feels refreshing because...wait for it...it brings garbage collection to C++ programmers. And where have we heard that before?
- xiaq 11y ago
  Golang is no more a Google language than Unix is an AT&T OS. And why are "corporate languages" necessarily bad?
  - brudgers 11y ago
    On the one hand, I was responding to the Atwood's law reference. On the other hand, I have become interested in the way corporations use open-source as a strategy and implement that strategy tactically via sort of "basic fighter maneuvers" energy management discipline. [1] Incipient potential competitors who adopt Go draw a dependency on Google because for all practical purposes, Google will determine the direction of Go: it's core team works there. And incipient potential competitors have radically different needs. We can differ in opinion upon whether Unix was seen an ATT operating system. For me the legal and licensing histories suggests that it was in a strong sense and the "Open" and "Free" and "Li___" are the heritage. YMMV. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_fighter_maneuvers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_fighter_maneuvers
    - EvanPlaice 11y ago
      Go is an incremental improvement over the C++ ecosystem without all the legacy baggage. By controling the platform, Google can leverage the ecosystem to attract and cherry-pick early adopters to the language. Once the language becomes populat enough that the Enterprise starts to adopt it, Google will already be onto their next 'ground breaking' technology. Once people settle on a perception they tend to hold on to it for life. One day soon people won't want to use Java. It'll be seen as "our Dad's language". Steve Yegge (ie now a Googler) said as much during his OSCON 2007 talk. The value isn't in the language/platform, it's the people who adopt/build/use it. Microsoft knows this, developers are what kept them afloat during a decade of stagnation in product development. Oracle thought they could buy their way in by acquiring Sun; except, while they were busy suing Google, Amazon sprinted ahead of the pack with their cloud services platform. This is how the biggest players make long-term investments. Guarantee an abundant stream of top tier talent and success will follow.
masklinn 11y ago
That kinda sorta makes sense given the feeling that "cgo is not go" (http://dave.cheney.net/2016/01/18/cgo-is-not-go http://dave.cheney.net/2016/01/18/cgo-is-not-go). Without cgo no FFI, without FFI you have to reimplement whatever you need in the host language.

Gurrewe 11y ago

Oh, so this is how Tyba found me. Cool stuff! Is there a way to see what information sourced has about yourself?

eisokant 11y ago
Hi Gustav! It is, all though these days we're named source{d}. We're working on some very cool visualisations to release later this year that allow you to dig in on all of the insights we've learned from your code. Right now there is no way yet, we're completely emerged on focusing on improving our backend (and doing some very cool stuff around deep learning to analyse your code). I'll keep you posted once we release.

patrickg 11y ago

Shameless plug: https://github.com/speedata/gogit https://github.com/speedata/gogit (I use that one with a 300 Gig repository) Edit: this is the backend used in https://ctanmirror.speedata.de/ https://ctanmirror.speedata.de/ a "travel back in time" archive of CTAN (back to 2013-03-17, IIRC)

zwerdlds 11y ago

Marginal, but, not to be confused with Gogs/Gogits: https://github.com/gogits/gogs https://github.com/gogits/gogs

toni 11y ago

So a while back I was cold-emailed by a recruiter at source{d} (the makers of this library). He wrote that after analyzing my Github profile, he has a great opportunity for me in Country A. I responded back by sending him my private phone number and showing interest in talking to him about this opportunity on the phone. Usually At this point, serious recruiters will do call you. But instead, he wrote that before going any further, he would like to ask me "a couple of quick questions" and requested if I could email him back my answers. The kind of questions I was supposed to answer were pretty amusing: for example, one of the questions involved telling "If I live near Country A." But he could easily find this out by looking at the country code of the phone number I just gave him in the previous email. My location is also public on my Github profile, so he could have easily found out that I live in Country B. which is around an hour away from Country A. The rest of the questions were also showing the recruiter's minimal knowledge of my actual Github profile. At this point it was pretty evident that I was corresponding with a bot. They were running different set of algorithms against different set of people, trying to analyze the results.

eisokant 11y ago
Hey Toni, Founder of source{d} here. First of all my apologies for the bad experience. This should have not happened. We're a team of developers ourselves (no recruiters) working on making sure that these kind of situations don't happen to any developer (we started this because we were fed up with the bad practices in recruitment). We're definitely not a bot, I can promise you this. Every email gets read by a developer themselves (our team: http://sourced.tech/about http://sourced.tech/about) and personally answered. If you send me an email (eiso@sourced.tech) I'll personally figure out what happened here.
- stevekemp 11y ago
  FWIW I've also had what felt very much like automated mails from your company. I've started marking them as spam after the first two.
  - orf 11y ago

shazow 11y ago

Here's one more while we're at it: https://src.sourcegraph.com/go-git https://src.sourcegraph.com/go-git This one is a fork of gogs' git implementation that I worked on briefly.

dh997 11y ago

I once had a cold-call recruiter tell me Go was worthless. I asked the recruiter to never call me again and hung up. People whom are both disrespectful and unable to see where their hockey puck sports analogies will be later on have marginal utility and are likely liabilities... don't get involved with those sorts.

stephenr 11y ago

What are the chances someone could use this to build a tool to provide structured output for git commands. SVN had the --xml flag for pretty much every command, allowing for 100% parseable output, with git ( in particular git log) there is no 100% solution - the best you can do is use --pretty=format and create delimiters you hope aren't used in the commit message (or author names/emails, etc) itself. The output doesn't have to be XML. JSON or even escaped CSV would be fine.