Junio C Hamano <gitster@xxxxxxxxx> writes: > Are you proposing to replace the tests written as shell scripts with > scripts in another language or framework that run equivalent > sequences of git commands that is as portable as, if not more, > Bourne shell? The language (/bin/sh) is probably not the biggest issue. The way we use it may be. I don't have benchmark to tell what slows down the testsuite, but for example we often write cat >expected <<EOF && content EOF git foo >actual && test_cmp expected actual We create 2 files, fork one 'cat' and one 'diff'. Now, suppose we can write instead test_check_output git foo <<EOF content EOF where test_check_output would be a compiled program running "git foo" with popen(), reading the expected output on stdin, and comparing both (and possibly creating files and forking 'diff', but only on the error path). That would reduce the overhead of test a lot: on fork+exec to create the "test_check_output" process + plain string comparison. Obviously, I don't expect this change to drastically reduce the time (Peff's numbers seem to suggest that there's not so much to gain), but maybe getting a few C helpers and "optimized" idioms in our testsuite could lead to measurable improvements. -- Matthieu Moy http://www-verimag.imag.fr/~moy/