Tezos Development Growth Continues With Over 870 Active Git Repositories On GitHub & GitLab

Tezos Git Repository Analysis

Tezos development growth continues with over 870 active Git repositories on GitHub & GitLab. A total of 874 active Tezos Git respositories were found. 

A further 976 non-active Gits were found, resulting in 1850 Tezos repositories on the two platforms found in total.

This does not include any active development classified from the recent TezAsia hackathon, which had over 11,100 registered participants.

The forked submissions for TezAsia can be found here, however this event is on-going and these submissions have not been included into this report. This is partly due to Gitopia not yet supplying a clone to ‘https’ feature used for easy compilation found here.

Active Git repositories for this report were those classified and showing activity within the last 12 months, non-active repositories are classified as showing no activity in 12 months.

A full list of Tezos GitHub and GitLab repositories compiled after duplicate, empty, archived and non-sustainable developments were removed can be found here.

This Git report was compiled manually in real-time and with progress reported on this HackMD notes terminal to ensure correctness and legitimate reporting (i.e. to remove archived repositories).

A Git repository is ‘…a  . Git/ folder inside a project. This repository tracks all changes made to files in your project, building a history over time’. 

They are often used by developers to build and collaborate on open-source projects. Within this system developers can push open-source code to be merged into certain projects/repositories.

Private repositories can also be made for specific teams to collaborate on source code, which can only be visible/edited to certain authorized people.

This system also allows people to have a record of what has been done, allowing developers to revert to specific versions should they ever need to.

Two of the largest Git repository platforms are GitHub and GitLab, however decentralized Git repository platforms such as Gitopia are starting to launch.

The main Tezos repository, which is also used for heavy core protocol development can be found here on GitLab.

Despite the preference for the Tezos core development to be worked on via GitLab, most Tezos projects (that are not at the core development level) still primarily use GitHub in order to build out projects.

One important benefit of GitLab over GitHub is the ability to self-host on your own server, meaning you control who has access to everything and how things are managed.

This is an often over-looked feature when it comes to maintaining core protocol decentralization, helping to keep code free from the reliance of centralized servers.

It also further improves security for more critical development hubs, ensuring another element of self-sovereignty. 

In the Tezos Git compilation, 1740 GitHub Tezos repositories were found compared to 110 GitLab, meaning over 93% of Tezos projects still utilize GitHub for open source development.

It is expected this figure is much higher for other chains, due to GitHub dominance and the Tezos core developers and critical infrastructure projects such as ‘Tezos Domains’ utlizing GitLab for development purposes.

In terms of the diversification of repositories Tezos stands in good stead. For example, out of 2,856 GitHub repositories listed for Cardano, Input/Output, a core development team, are responsible for at least 521 of those, or around 18.24%. 

Likewise, with Polkadot, the ParityTech and W3F teams are building out over 26% of the 2,131 repositories for the blockchain on GitHub.

The main Tezos core development teams (i.e. Nomadic Labs, Marigold, Tarides, DaiLambda, Functori, Tweag) over both GitHub and GitLab represent around 2.59% of total repositories.

This shows that the main core development teams for other platforms are responsible for building out more of the infrastructure and applications above the core protocol level, rather than having the more diversified growth Tezos is enjoying when it comes to this type of development. 

Tezos Core Development Repository

The Tezos core development repositories is one of the most active in the blockchain space. As mentioned the Tezos core development main repository can be found here.

Here, we can see that this repository has over 18,700 commits, 340 branches and 49 releases. Over 4,500 merge requests have been completed, with over 6,000 merge requests being put forward.

The total commits of 18,700 for the main Tezos GitLab core development repository represents over 30% of total Tezos repository commits (including GitHub & GitLab). 

When we look at the core repository of Tezos compared to all the GitHub repositories of other blockchains, Tezos core development commits on GitLab (18,700) represent over 51% of all Cardano commits (including non-core development) on GitHub (36,319).

In terms of Polkadot, Tezos core development commits only (18,700) represent over 38% of all Polkadot commits (including non-core development) on GitHub (48,999).

In total, spread across GitHub and GitLab Tezos has over 60,000 commits in terms of both core-development and non-core development (not including Gitopia).

Taking into account all repositories (both core and non-core) on GitHub and GitLab, Cardano has around 59% of total Tezos commits and Polkadot has around 80% of total Tezos commits.

Initial analysis shows no significant usage of GitLab for either Polkadot, or Cardano, however they could be using other repository platforms.

Commit Totals:

“The git commit command will save all staged changes, along with a brief description from the user, in a “commit” to the local repository. Commits are at the heart of Git usage. You can think of a commit as a snapshot of your project, where a new version of that project is created in the current repository.”

 Tezos: GitHub and GitLab = 60,990 commits.

Cardano: GitHub and GitLab = 36,319 commits.

Polkadot: GitHub and GitLab = 48,999 commits.

In the main Tezos core development repository, we can see that nearly 80% of the code is written in OCaml, however WebAssembly is catching up with the introduction of a WASM compatible layer 2 scheduled in a future upgrade.

This suggests that the use of industrial strength, robust, statically-typed, and functional programming languages remain of the upmost important for Tezos at the core protocol layer. 

It is expected overall Tezos development languages will become further diversified in the future as C, C++, and Rust all have good Wasm-compilers for layer 2 programming.

As more Proof-generative Virtual Machines (PVMs) get added such as the one which will run WebAssembly, (i.e. EVM), it is expected that the programming languages used in Tezos core development will also further diversify. 

In the Tezos GitHub repositories, which were not related to core development, languages and language frameworks used were much more varied:

Record Smart Contract Deployments

In addition to the Git repository growth, there has also been significant smart contract deployment growth on the Tezos blockchain.

It was recently reported that Tezos hit a record of over 10,000 smart contract deployments in just one month. The end figure for July 2022 was over 11,800 new smart contract deployments.

This represented a 2,253% increase on deployments for the same month year-on-year.

Current smart contract deployment figures can be found here on Better Call Dev, with August 2022 also looking set to be a very strong month.

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