[[!tag announcement larch]]

It has been a long time since I announced a version of Larch on my blog: about 14 months. A fair bit has happened since then: see the NEWS file for details. Below is the snippet for today's release.

This is an implementation of particular kind of B-tree, based on research by Ohad Rodeh. See "B-trees, Shadowing, and Clones" (copied here with permission of author) for details on the data structure. This is the same data structure that btrfs uses. Note that my implementation is independent from the btrfs one, and might differ from what the paper describes.

The distinctive feature of this B-tree is that a node is never modified (sort-of). Instead, all updates are done by copy-on-write. Among other things, this makes it easy to clone a tree, and modify only the clone, while other processes access the original tree. This is utterly wonderful for my backup application, and that's the reason I wrote larch in the first place.

See the home page and README for more information; the API docs may be amusingly sparse.

Version 1.20120527, released 2012-05-27

• New version scheme. Thank you, Joey Hess.
• The on-disk data structures and file formats are now declared frozen. An automatic test has been added to verify that things do not break.