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by Analemma_ 3427 days ago
> I still think we need something better than Git, though. It brought some very cool ideas and the inner workings are reasonably understandable, but the UI is atrociously complicated. And yes, dealing with large files is a very sore point.

Note that Google and Facebook ran into the same problems Microsoft did, and their solution was to use Mercurial and build similar systems on top of it. Microsoft could've done that too, but instead decided to improve Git, which deserves some commendation. I'd rather Git and hg both got better rather than one "taking over".
2 comments
aanm1988 3427 days ago
Google uses some variant of perforce, just like MS has been doing.
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voxic11 3427 days ago
They used to, but now they use Piper which is built on top of mercurial.
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delroth 3427 days ago
Piper is not built on top of Mercurial.
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voxic11 3427 days ago
Sorry, you are right, I got it confused with some other work Google was doing to improve the scalability of mercurial. It's not based on perforce though either, appears to be entirely custom technology.
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stp-ip 3427 days ago
They first outgrew git, then outgrew perforce and implemented a custom server on top of their usual storage/database stack.
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severino 3427 days ago
> Microsoft could've done that too, but instead decided to improve Git,

They didn't improve git, they only made this for themselves and for their product users. Git doesn't restrict you to a single operating system.

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Kipters 3427 days ago
Look at Issue 4 on their GitHub repo, they want to port it also to Linux and macOS
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askvictor 3427 days ago
> They didn't improve git, they only made this for themselves and for their product users. Git doesn't restrict you to a single operating system.

Given Microsoft's recent form, I'd expect this to appear on Linux before long, and possibly osx too. In any case, it's open source so you could always port it yourself.

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Sir_Cmpwn 3427 days ago
I would be surprised. This sort of project is deeply OS-specific. If they wanted to eventually make it cross-platform, they would have started by implementing FUSE on Windows.
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zintinio5 3427 days ago
Several years ago a friend and I had a need to build a virtual file system that was portable between Linux and Windows. At the very least, we attempted to share as much code as possible. It proved to be pretty easy and we had a working prototype after about 30 hours of work. We used FUSE on Linux, and Dokan FUSE on Windows.

[1] https://dokan-dev.github.io/

[2] https://github.com/dokan-dev/dokany/wiki/FUSE

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severino 3427 days ago
> In any case, it's open source so you could always port it yourself

Of course, but that would be me, and not Microsoft, who's improving git ;-)

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