The counter never resets, it just keeps going up and we only look at the low bits. So eventually it will need to wrap. It's doubtful that ever happened in pract

The counter never resets, it just keeps going up and we only look at the low bits. So eventually it will need to wrap. It's doubtful that ever happened in practice, even on a 32-bit system (you'd need to print 2 billion SHA-1s in a single process, and even the largest repos have on the order of millions). So the key difference between the old and the new is that the counter resets to zero every fourth call.