The other day I was trying to work with git LFS. I was very surprised to find out git-lfs, as in the binary, CLI application is the only (open) implementation in existence. There is nothing else. And even it itself does not offer itself up as a library; so even native Go code (the implementation language) has to fall back to shelling out to the CLI git extension! Not even bindings are possible. Such a painful loss of interoperability: IPC via return codes and parsing stdout/stderr.

It seems a similar story with the rest of git. I have hopes for gitoxide aka gix, and think the approach of library-first is correct going into the future. A CLI is then simply a thin wrapper around it, mapping argv to library operations basically.