Today marks a significant milestone in our journey. After intense development and countless iterations, we're thrilled to announce the first alpha release of Astral—a version control system designed for the modern developer.
Why We Built Astral
Every developer has a Git story. The cryptic error messages. The accidental force pushes. The merge conflicts that seem to multiply. The staging area that never quite makes sense.
Git revolutionized software development, but it was designed over two decades ago for a very specific use case: managing the Linux kernel. The computing landscape has changed dramatically since then. Our tools should evolve too.
"We didn't set out to replace Git. We set out to imagine what version control could be if we started fresh, with modern hardware and modern workflows in mind."
What Makes Astral Different
Speed That Scales
Astral uses Blake3 for cryptographic hashing—a modern algorithm that's not just faster than SHA-1, but designed to take full advantage of modern CPU architectures. On benchmarks, we see 10-15x improvements for large file operations.
But speed isn't just about hashing. Astral's architecture is parallel by default. Status checks, diffs, and even merges leverage all available cores.
Radical Simplicity
We removed the staging area. It sounds small, but it fundamentally changes the mental model. In Astral, asl save does what you expect—it saves your changes. No need to remember which files you've added, no intermediate state to manage.
Stack-Based Workflow
Modern code review platforms like GitHub and Gerrit encourage small, focused changes. But managing dependent changes in Git is painful. Astral's stack model makes this natural—navigate, reorder, and ship stacks of commits with ease.
What's in v0.1.0-alpha
This release includes:
- Core operations: init, save, status, diff, log
- Stack navigation: stack, prev, next, goto, amend
- Branching: branch, switch, merge
- Object inspection: cat-object, hash-object
What's Coming
This is just the beginning. Our roadmap for the includes:
- Smart and Unique Features
- Enhanced conflict resolution tools
- IDE integrations (VS Code, JetBrains)
- GUI client
- Git interoperability improvements
Try It Today
We'd love for you to try Astral and share your feedback. This is an alpha release— there will be bugs, rough edges, and missing features. But we believe even at this early stage, you'll see the potential.