Re: [darcs-users] Re: [BK] upgrade will be needed

[Andrea Arcangeli <andrea@suse.de>]

On Thu, Feb 17, 2005 at 06:24:53PM -0800, Tupshin Harper wrote:
> small to medium sized ones). Last I checked, Arch was still too slow in 
> some areas, though that might have changed in recent months. Also, many 

IMHO someone needs to rewrite ARCH using the RCS or SCCS format for the
backend and a single file for the changesets and with sane parameters
conventions miming SVN. The internal algorithms of arch seems the most
advanced possible. It's just the interface and the fs backend that's so
bad and doesn't compress in the backups either.  SVN bsddb doesn't
compress either by default, but at least the new fsfs compresses pretty
well, not as good as CVS, but not as badly as bsddb and arch either.

I may be completely wrong, so take the above just as a humble
suggestion.

darcs scares me a bit because it's in haskell, I don't believe very much
in functional languages for compute intensive stuff, ram utilization
skyrockets sometime (I wouldn't like to need >1G of ram to manage the
tree). Other languages like python or perl are much slower than C/C++
too but at least ram utilization can be normally dominated to sane
levels with them and they can be greatly optimized easily with C/C++
extensions of the performance critical parts.