Pijul: a distributed version control system, written in Rust (2019)
FWIW, this has gotten a certain amount of attention on HN over the years since it was begun but it&#x27;s instantly noticeable that patches tailed off and stopped last June. Naturally that raises the question of &quot;is this even still alive&quot;, and last month the starter of the project, Pierre Meunier, posted a response to a query about that indicating a major rewrite is in progress:<p>----<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.pijul.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;is-this-project-still-active-yes-it-is&#x2F;451" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;discourse.pijul.org&#x2F;t&#x2F;is-this-project-still-active-y...</a><p>&gt;<i>Is Pijul still under active development?</i><p>&gt;<i>That’s right, the last patches are pretty old. A few things have happened since then, but they’re not public yet. This has included (1) thinking about new algorithms to solve our remaining problems and (2) thinking about the future and sustainability of the project, including its funding.</i><p>&gt;<i>Another thing going on is a major rewrite of libpijul. This project was our first Rust project, was started in a pretty early version of Rust, on an incomplete theory that was only finalised in 2019. Until then it wasn’t clear what functions and types we wanted to expose, and how to document them.</i><p>&gt;<i>I’m currently reorganising everything, in particular using a lot more proc-macros, and making it more general so that it can run on various backends (well, actually different variants of Sanakirja).</i><p>&gt;<i>We will hopefully have news pretty soon. I’d love to fix all the bugs in the Nest discussions, my hope is that many of them will simply disappear with the rewrite.</i><p>----<p>Of course, everyone here probably knows about the risks of major rewrites, though granted that&#x27;s lessoned for something that began in the research phase and never got close to a 1.0 and major uptake. It is a pretty interesting project and I&#x27;d love to see it go well, so hopefully it can make the series of transitions to something more mature and self-sustaining! For now though it looks like things will be in a bit of stasis, and everyone will have to wait and see what emerges on the other side.