Fixing Git "out of memory" errors on Windows

Googling around, I found a lot of people had the same problem with Git on Windows that I did: large files (where “large” means above 350MB or so) cause “out of memory” errors. A quick look into the file causing the error, Git.pm (ugh, perl), shows the reason right away: they’re doing nice, small 1KB reads of the file blob in a loop… but collecting the whole thing in memory before writing it all out.

A look at modern DVCSs

I’ve been a user of the Bazaar distributed VCS from Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu Linux) for a while now, at least for my personal projects. When I first chose it, I had already spent some time playing with Darcs for a few small projects. Darcs got its start in 2001 with roots in the GNU Arch project. (Bazaar’s predecessor - also named Bazaar - also has its roots in Arch.

©2011-2025 Justin C. Miller.   What a horrible night to have a curse.