Excellent question! This project is indeed mathematically possible, but did require two separate innovations: - an "engineering" one, called Sanakirja, which i

Excellent question! This project is indeed mathematically possible, but did require two separate innovations: - an "engineering" one, called Sanakirja, which is a fast, forkable, transactionnal, on-disk key-value store. Although it might not be as super-fast as other database engines, it's forkable (allowing to make fast branches in Pijul). - a few "mathematical" innovations: - a good understanding of why Darcs is linearly slow in the normal case, and exponentially slow in the worst case. - some category theory to give a hint of relevant datastructures. - a few graph algorithms with just the right algorithmic complexity. - a good enough data representation for patches and repositories. (disclaimer: I'm the lead author on most of this).