Rift speeds up creating parallel dev workspaces by using copy-on-write filesystem primitives to clone files instead of physically duplicating an entire repository like git worktrees do.

12:47Rift is from Anomaly, which is the folks behind Open Code. So, they kind of know what they're working working with here. And they have implemented a better alternative to get work trees. So, I saw this on on Twitter today. If you don't know what Rift did, Rift did an experimental alter alternative to get work trees. It creates isolated writable workspaces using copy on write file system primitives instead of copying

13:13your repository. So, one of the downsides to using work trees is that um your git blobs and storage and all of that stuff that is shared between um branches and and work trees in git. But what is not shared is it literally copy pastes every single file. And even if you don't have a particularly large um like like 10 gigs worth of code, you could have thousands and thousands of

13:42files and you know that copy pasting many many files can can take a little bit of time. So what this does is it uses some primitives that are in your file system. So on Mac OS um APFS most modern Macs are are using APFS or I would say all of them. Um and what that does is it uses clone file meaning that it will clone the file but it will not

14:09actually make a duplicate version of that file until it absolutely needs to. Um and what that allows you to do is is you simply can make a work tree much faster. It's not like oh wow this is amazing. I just think this is pretty nifty. It's not something that's built into Git just yet. So, people are looking at alternatives to it. Looks like it works on some Linux, all of Mac,

14:35and I I don't know if Windows has a primitive like this or not. I was looking into it. Maybe chat can let us know, but it be it I I don't see why you wouldn't dip into something like this other than it is experimental. >> Oh, that's a perfect uh thing for me to dip into. got the experimentals. I love it. >> Yes. >> Yeah. Just your description of it sounds