For my application i rely heavily on the speed of git status, I noticed that go-git does not use modification times where upstream git would do so for a git status. I noticed a large performance discrepancy between the mentioned application using -go-git, and a roughly 30 line bash script using upstream git which should be doing the functional equivalent.

Depending on the size of the files in a worktree, the use of modtimes instead of rehashing everything results in substantial time savings.

The existing benchmark for git status, with a rather trivial size for a repo, already shows a ~6x performance increase. I expect this performance increase to be larger with larger repo's.

go test -bench=.                      
2025/10/19 22:21:25 comparing mod time: 2025-10-19 22:21:25.886774837 +0200 CEST == 2025-10-19 22:21:25.886774837 +0200 CEST on linux (amd64)
goos: linux
goarch: amd64
pkg: github.com/go-git/go-git/v6
cpu: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10400F CPU @ 2.90GHz
...
BenchmarkWorktreeStatus-12                                                      	     612	   1919965 ns/op
PASS
ok  	github.com/go-git/go-git/v6	79.787s

With this change applied:

go test -bench=.
....
BenchmarkWorktreeStatus-12                                                      	    3792	    302731 ns/op
PASS
ok  	github.com/go-git/go-git/v6	47.303s

Basically this change first checks if modification time is the same between the index and the worktree, if not proceed as usual by rehashing, if the same, mark as equal.

This could well be very naive and some expert review is needed. Note that this 'fasthpath' would become the default when doing a worktree.Status(). Another option would be to introduce an Option for Status(...).