GitHub Atom 1.9 picks up some speed, drops API

It's two steps forward, one step back for GitHub's Atom editor.

GitHub is moving ahead with the text editor, releasing a speedier upgrade, version 1.9, this week and revealing intentions for the follow-up edition, now in a beta stage. But the company nixed the GitRepositoryAsync API for interaction with Git repositories and apologized to package authors about the deletion.

"Earlier this year, we added an experimental async API for interacting with Git repositories based on libgit2 called GitRepositoryAsync," GitHub's Nathan Sobo said. "Unfortunately, our bindings in libgit were causing Atom's helper process to become unstable, leading to hard crashes." The API was never officially public, but package authors were using it anyway based on examples in bundled packages. "We apologize to any package authors who may have switched to these new APIs," said Sobo, "but we've been forced to back out the async APIs."

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