Empirical Study Reveals Unsoundness in Git's Default Merge Algorithm
rickasaurus · x · 2026-08-12
Marc Brooster released an empirical study on the soundness of Git's three-way merge. It reveals that under the default ort strategy, Git can silently produce an "unsound" merge — yielding incorrect results without flagging any conflicts.
Motivated by a 2007 paper on Diff3, the project provides a minimal reproducible counterexample. It also includes a fuzzer to hunt for such flawed merges and a minimizer tool to reduce counterexamples. The issue has been successfully reproduced in Git version 2.50.1.
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