In a previous blog post I explained how you can substantially improve the performance of git on Windows updating the underlying SSH implementation. This performance improvement is very worthwhile in a standard Unix-style git setup where access to the git repository is done using ssh as the transport layer. For a regular development workstation, this update works fine as long as you keep remembering that you need to check and possibly update the ssh binaries after every git update.

Admittedly I’m  not the biggest fan of git - I prefer Mercurial - but we’re using it at work and it does a good job as a DVCS. However, we’re mostly a Windows shop and the out of the box performance of Git for Windows is anything but stellar when you are using ssh as the transport for git. That’s not too much bother with most of our repos but we have a couple of fairly big ones and clone performance with those matters.

A piece of code I recently worked with required data structures that hold unique, sorted data elements. The requirement for the data being both sorted and unique came from it being fed into std::set_intersection() so using an std::set seemed to be an obvious way of fulfilling these requirements. The code did fulfill all the requirements but I found the performance somewhat wanting in this particular implementation (Visual Studio 2008 with the standard library implementation shipped by…