Team:Vanderbilt Software/Project/darwin

Version control systems sych as git and svn focus on differences between lines. Since most DNA file formats split DNA to fixed-length lines, many lines are changed at once, for example, when inserting a single new line. darwin does away with that by producing a formatted file representing each ORF on its own line of text, making each edit only modify a single line of the output text.

Genes can be very long. To combat this, darwin will sample a section of every newly inserted ORF and compare it to nearby ORFs; if the new ORF is similar to another ORF, it is counted as “edited,” and darwin only records the character-by-character changes required to transform the old ORF into the new ORF.

Finally, darwin uses concurrency to help speed up the process. File I/O is typically extremely slow, much slower than processing a file data already in memory. Splitting the processing concurrently helps to open up that speed bottleneck.