Hacker News: nathanpankon

New comment by nathanpankon in "How big is a Git commit?"

nathanpankon — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 12:42:04 +0000

There are some attempts at this (semanticdiff, etc) and they seem very good. But I was looking for a tool that could actively edit a set portion of code, maintaining a small diff above a moving target

In that case merging from "main" starts to be extremely difficult

New comment by nathanpankon in "How big is a Git commit?"

nathanpankon — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 08:17:46 +0000

Good call, made it public :)

Thanks!

New comment by nathanpankon in "How big is a Git commit?"

nathanpankon — Sun, 11 Oct 2026 07:03:08 +0000

I played with making a git alternative that was streamlined according to workflow. I haven't completely abandoned it, but my core idea was that you can use ast path to compress the data further.

Like you said git is really efficient, and even though I went in with some criticism because of the work(mess) that is chromium and the deep hacking I did there to fix stuff between versions without forcing a complete rebuild

I came to the conclusion that as a compression alternative, my approach wasn't worth it. Git did a better job!

Anyway here's the attempt: https://github.com/pankon/gat