Re: [GSoC] Applying for conversion scripts to builtins

Johannes Schindelin [off-list ref] writes:

Therefore, I would wager a bet that just the mere conversion of a
shell script into even a primitive `run_command()`-based builtin would
help performance on Windows in a noticeable manner.

As you correctly allege, if a patch rewrote a shell-scripted
porcelain by using series of run_command() and doing nothing else, I
would have asked "is that an improvement?", without knowing that.

Of course, it would be *even nicer* to avoid the spawning altogether.

Yeah, that, too ;-)

The biggest benefit of avoiding needless parsing, however, is not
performance. It is avoiding quoting issues. This is particularly so on
Windows, where Git is sometimes called from outside a shell
environment, where we have to deal with inconsistent quoting because
it is every Windows program's own job to parse the command-line,
including the quoting.

Concrete example: on Windows, we have file locking issues because
files that are in use cannot be deleted. For that reason, we have
Windows-specific code that is "nice" by trying harder to delete files,
giving programs a little time to let their locks go. This locking
issue happens also when a virus scanner "uses"...

These are definitely good advices from the area expert.

Thanks for a bunch of good input.