> There must be a reason why it was rewritten in C. The motivation for rewriting in C was performance on Windows - since Windows has very inefficient forking,

> There must be a reason why it was rewritten in C. The motivation for rewriting in C was performance on Windows - since Windows has very inefficient forking, shell scripts are very slow there[1]. I think that says more about the deficiencies of Windows than the deficiencies of the shell scripting/pipeline model. This is slightly besides the point anyways. Even though most of Git has been rewritten in C, Git is still comprised of lots of little single-purpose commands, which I have used in pipelines to do some "outside the box" processing on Git repositories. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_%28software%29#Portability http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_%28software%29#Portability