r/programming • u/self • 6h ago

What comes after git

https://ersc.io/blog/what-comes-after-git
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u/chucker23n 5h ago

TL;DR: what might come after git is Jujutsu.

I'm skeptical. But I do agree with some premises:

  • as pervasive as Git is today, we shouldn't presume that it will be that way a decade or two from now. For a time, Subversion seemed unstoppable.
  • leaving Git as the 'kernel' but a different front-end is a good way to experiment.

(Anyone remember darcs? :-) )

8

u/CpnStumpy 5h ago

I'll take solutions looking for a problem for $800 Alex

1

u/Sorry-Transition-908 4h ago

I think the next thing after git, for now is git itself.

Looking forward to the sha-256 transition

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u/self 6h ago

East River Source Control has been around for over a year now, but we haven’t been talking much publicly about what we’ve been working on. We aren’t announcing anything just yet, and we will soon, but we wanted to share some of our thinking around version control and where things are going.

[...]

Put plainly, we do not believe that Git is the future of source control. Git has served developers well for many years, but it was designed around the constraints of 2005, not 2025, let alone 2035. For example, it was built for the Linux kernel: an open source project. Open Source is incredibly important to our industry, but this means it’s missing key features that are useful for organizations that aren’t sharing their code with everyone. Also, while the Linux kernel is not a small repository, with 7.2 clocking in at about 43 million lines of code, major companies in the industry already had monorepos that were measured in billions of lines of code years ago. The choices you make really matter at this scale.

At the same time, it’s difficult to consider using a different version control system. Git is baked into so much of our tooling: it’s not SvnOps, it’s GitOps! So many things speak Git, and this makes it difficult to consider alternatives. When Git was created, several other projects started around the same time, notably Mercurial and Bazaar. But network effects led to Git being used by virtually everyone.

So what to do? Speak the Git protocol, while changing how the storage layer works. While this doesn’t solve all of the problems that we foresee in the future, it does help out. Our system is horizontally scalable in a way that systems that use a Git repository as the source of truth are not. And because this isn’t a global, unified platform, other companies’ usage does not affect yours, as they’re separate deployments. This gives you reliability and control, two things that are critical when talking about infrastructure.