The reftable backend: What it is, where it's headed, and why should you care?
summary
Ref table becomes a real, shipping refs backend merged in Git 2.45 and adds binary tables.list/tables files for atomic multi-ref updates; libgit2 gains a full backend implementation split across five PRs and 16,000 lines of code. Concrete wins: batched conflict checks reduce creating 10,000 recreated refs from ~80s to 11s, fetch of 100,000 refs drops from ~40s to 1.5s, and remote-rename of 100k branches falls from ~10 minutes to ~12s. Migration and tooling land in 2.46–2.49.
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chapters (8)
- 0:00Introduction
- 3:14What ref tables are
- 8:08Ref tables' future and goals
- 15:27Performance vs files backend
- 16:51New tooling and migration
- 17:34Ecosystem adoption and plans
- 18:40Why ref tables matter
- 20:23Q&A
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