This is a personal technical study and a small utility I built to explore what's possible with high performance systems programming in Rust. It specifically looks at how to use redb for storing data and gix (gitoxide) for handling Git repositories without the usual overhead.
Warning
This is a pet project of mine. I'm using it to learn and experiment with optimizations, so it's definitely not meant for production use or anything mission critical. Use it at your own risk!
I wanted to see how far I could push the performance of a simple CLI task fetching and managing .gitignore files. Usually, tools like this either call the git command directly or walk through thousands of files on your disk. I wanted to see if I could do better by going deeper into how these libraries work.
Instead of just "running git," I'm using gix to talk directly to the Git Object Database.
- What I learned: By performing a bare clone, I don't have to wait for the computer to write thousands of tiny files to my hard drive just to read one
.gitignoretemplate. I can just traverse the repository's "tree" in memory and pull the exact content I need. - The tradeoff: It's definitely more complex than just running a shell command! You have to handle OIDs and tree structures yourself, which was a great learning experience.
Once the templates are fetched, I save them in a local redb database.
- What I learned: Using memory mapped B-Trees feels like magic. It lets the tool access templates almost instantly without the usual
open()andread()overhead for every single file. It also means the tool works great offline once you've synced it. - The tradeoff: Honestly, using a database for a few text files is probably "over engineering," but it was the perfect way to test how
redbhandles this kind of workload and ensures the tool always performs the same way, no matter how many templates you have.
I made a few guesses about what makes a CLI tool fast on Linux, and then I tested them:
- Cutting down System Calls: I assumed that every time the program has to talk to the Linux kernel, it slows down a bit. So, I tried to keep those "conversations" to a minimum.
- Static Linking: I built the tool with
muslso it's a completely standalone file. It's a bit larger, but it doesn't have to look for libraries on your system when it starts up. - Memory Mapping: I relied on the OS to handle the heavy lifting of reading the database file into memory, which seems a lot more efficient for this kind of work.
These are the results I got using strace -c on my own Linux setup. Your results might be different, but they give a good idea of the footprint:
| Task | Command | Syscall Count | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Check Version | git-ignore -v |
89 | Mostly just starting the process. |
| List Everything | git-ignore -l |
96 | Quick look at the index. |
| Get a Template | git-ignore Rust |
111 | Reading directly from memory. |
| Update a File | git-ignore -p Node |
121 | Parsing and merging blocks. |
Just for fun: A simple "Hello World" in some languages can take over 300 syscalls just to say hello!
- Mix and Match: You can pull templates from multiple places at once like the standard GitHub ones plus your own personal repository.
- Smart Merging: I built a "Patcher" that uses
git-ignore-start/endmarkers in your.gitignore. It knows which parts it "owns" so it can update them without messing up your own custom rules. - Fast Updates: It only downloads what has actually changed since the last time you ran it.
- Rust (I recommend Nightly for the ultimate static builds)
just(for running the build commands)
cargo build --releasejust release-staticMIT - Copyright (c) 2026 zerosign