Manyana: A Coherent Vision For The Future Of Version Control

Summary

I’m releasing Manyana, a project which I believe presents a coherent vision for the future of version control — and a compelling case for building it.It’s based on the fundamentally sound approach of using CRDTs for version control, which is long overdue but hasn’t happened yet because of subtle UX issues. A CRDT merge always succeeds by definition, so there are no conflicts in the traditional sense — the key insight is that changes should be flagged as conflicting when they touch each other, giving you informative conflict presentation on top of a system which never actually fails. This project works that out.One immediate benefit is much more informative conflict markers. Two people branch from a file containing a function. One deletes the function. The other adds a line in the middle of it. A traditional VCS gives you this:<<<<<<< left ======= def calculate(x): a = x * 2 logger.debug(f"a={a}") b = a + 1 return b >>>>>>> rightTwo opaque blobs. You have to mentally reconstruct what actually happened.Manyana gives you this:<<<<<<< begin deleted left def calculate(x): a = x * 2 ======= begin added right logger.debug(f"a={a}") ======= begin deleted left b = a + 1 return b >>>>>>> end conflictEach section tells you what happened and who did it. Left deleted the function. Right added a line in the middle. You can see the structure of the conflict instead of staring at two blobs trying to figure it out.CRDTs (Conflict-Free Replicated Data Types) give you eventual consistency: merges never fail, and the result is always the same no matter what order branches are merged in — including many branches mashed together by multiple people working independently. That one property turns out to have profound implications for every aspect of version control design.Line ordering becomes permanent. When two branches insert code at the same point, the CRDT picks an ordering and it sticks. This prevents problems when conflicting sections are both kept but resolved in different orders on...