Pijul, a distributed version control system emphasizing patches rather than commits, could emerge as a potential challenger to Git and Subversion.
Snapshot-based systems like Git or Mercurial are typically fast, but they’re hard to use for more than simple operations. On the other hand, patch-based systems like Darcs are simple to use, but slow.
Pijul represents data in a more general manner than snapshot-based systems, allowing for a patch-based interface. « In short: [Git and Subversion’s] main concept is commits, which are states of a project at a given point in time, » Pijul co-developer Pierre-Etienne Meunier said. « Ours is patches, which changes to the state of a project. »
Because it uses the memory-safe Rust systems programming language , Pijul also offers safety. Git doesn’t offer mathematical guarantees on its operations, Meunier noted, and as a result, a commit could be different from what was expected.
