rat

rat is a simple version control system written in Rust designed primarily to be easy to understand and modify, with as few external dependencies as is practical. The final version implements a (very) minimal subset of git.

Git can often end up being a sort of magic box, even to many who use it on a daily basis. rat is intended to demystify its internals so you can develop a better mental model of git, and understand how elegant it really is.

Secondarily, it also demonstrates a fairly idiomatic Rust program, so you can improve your understanding of how large Rust programs can be structured one step at a time.

All the material here assumes a decent amount of familiarity with Rust, but only a surface-level one with git. If you want to learn Rust, the book is a great place to start, and the git tutorial has the basics you need for git.

You can use the crate documentation for any version to find what you're looking for, which is useful as the code gets larger.

cargo doc --open

Run rat with:

cargo run <COMMAND> <ARGUMENTS>

Questions

If you have any questions about the source code or the explanations surrounding it, feel free to ask them on the Discussions page.

Before you ask about the name, though, it's just "Rust + Git" = "rit", but then I thought of the absurd pun of calling the repo a "nest", so now it's called rat.

License

rat is intended to be a purely educational tool released freely into the public domain wherever possible. See the license for the full terms.

Credits

rat owes a profound debt of inspiration and guidance from many sources, but most especially Write Yourself a Git and The Git Parable.

Contributing

If you find a problem at any point, whether technical or educational, I'd appreciate if you opened an issue about it. Pull requests are also greatly appreciated, though make sure to explicitly specify that you agree to have your contribution released into the public domain.

By contributing, you agree to adhere to the Code of Conduct.