It'd be way easier (and actually not completely insane, though still far from sane) in git: you'd store the functions in blobs instead of misusing svn commits. It'd probably be a lot faster too as Git is fairly good at giving you object content.

Admittedly the GC would be an issue, but I think that would be fixable: instead of a `functions` key in a json, link all the functions in a tree object, the link that tree object from a commit that way you have the author for free. And then the class name can be a ref' in a bespoke namespace.

Well that's the issue that it's not necessarily clear what commits go together to compose the system, so might actually be better to replace the ref' per class by a tree for the entire thing, with each class being a commit entry, and an other commit capping the entire thing. Of course git will not understand what's happening as commit entries in trees are normally for submodules but that's fine, git is just used as a data store here.