4 ms·

IIUC a merkle tree is a data structure where the leaf nodes are the hashes of data. The inner nodes of the tree are hashes of the child hashes up to a root hash

• nextaccountic 3y ago
  git commits themselves are merkle trees (or more like, DAGs) that contain filesystem trees, a set of parent commits, and metadata each parent commit in turn contains their own parents etc, until you reach an initial commit the funny thing here is that parent commits don't have references to children, it's children that have references to parents (like the union find data structure) so the relationship here is inverted. that's because git objects are immutable