Git has been around since 2005 and has become the de-facto standard for controlling versions of source code. I recently asked myself if Git will continue to dominate and if innovation is possible or even necessary. I will go through some of the major drawbacks of Git, that could motivate innovation, list Git alternatives and conclude with my personal thoughts on the future of version control.
Update: Folks are discussing this post and version control in general over on HN so head over there if you want to read some more opinions and thoughts on this topic.
If you are new user to Git, it is likely that your critique will focus on usability. Its user interface is called obnoxious and arcane and its underlying concepts can be alien and difficult to learn. Engineers famously say they learn just enough to use it but if something does not go exactly according to plan, they are lost, don't understand how to solve the problem and simply start over.
I think in 2024, this opinion is less wide-spread than it once was. Git is an essential tool for version control and collaboration in software development. There exist excellent learning resources and Git clients that focus on user experience. Universities teach Git as part of introductory software engineering courses.
If you are a long time and heavy Git user and especially if you are working in large repos (many commits, many files, large files, or a combination thereof) you might be more concerned with scalability issues. This was for example investigated in 2012 by engineers at Facebook. Since then, a lot of improvements and additions were made, to tackle performance problems in Git. For example Git-lfs for large files, fsmonitor to improve status performance and shallow or partial tools like scalar.
But working with very large repos still can feel a bit awkward, because Git is a distributed version control system where each repository has a complete copy of all files and their full history.
Beyond scalability, there are a few features missing in Git, one might come across when using it for some time or for particular projects.
- granular permissions: Git lacks built-in support for granular permissions on different parts of a repository
- binary diffing: Git's diff and merge capabilities are designed for text files. Handling and diffing binary files is not well supported.
Alternatives #
So let's look into what Git alternatives exists -- lets start with older ones:
Open Source #
Mercurial was started almost at the same time as Git by Olivia Mackall, a kernel hacker at the time, motivated, just like Linus, by the BitKeeper and SourcePuller drama of spring 2005. It is famously used at Facebook. I've never used it and I don't think it beats Git in terms of performance. But studying it for a bit, I discovered one of my new favorite commands absorb. Also, in the context of studying Mercurial, I discovered stacked-diffs Overall it is an enriching journey into version control workflows.
Fossil is a bit of an odd duck in the Git-alternative lineup. In addition to being a distributed VCS like Git, it features bug tracking, wiki, forum, email alerts and chat. In a way it is Git + GitHub in one package. It is built on and is used for SQLite development -- their homepage is I believe a fossil repo. One can get free hosting on Chisel. It seems like an interesting choice for smaller projects and self-hosting enthusiasts.
sapling, releated by Facebook is a cross-platform, highly scalable, Git-compatible source control system. It is inspired by Mercurial (no surprise there). It looks quite interesting, but appears to be a work in progress. They are working on a custom server called Mononoke, which I presume would replace GitHub once it is available. It seems quite interesting and I will follow its progress.
Jujutsu or jj is a version control system
started by Martin von Zweigbergk as a hobby project in late 2019 that has now
turned into a full-time project at Google. Some of its highlights I find
intruding and that are called out in a talk (slides) about jj are that the working copy is a commit that gets amended automatically.
I find this very interesting and would love to see how this changes some pathological
workflows where Git status shows tons of untracked files.
Also, one can commit conflicts and delay the resolution and collaborate on
the resolution. jj is written as a Rust library.
Commercial Alternatives #
There are some closed-source commercial alternatives to Git
Perforce Helix Core is a centralized version control system that is known for its performance and handling large repositories that hold binary files well. Working offline is possible and it supports exclusive checkouts (file locking). Perforce works with changelists. As far as I can tell, a changelist is a mix of pull request and Git branch with a single commit. Push and pull commands are implemented as shelve and un-shelve operations for backup, collaboration and local testing.
Plastic SCM is similar to Perforce, and is popular with game developers with tight integration with Unity but can also be used stand-alone. In my investigation into how it is used, I learned that it does not seem to be uncommon to track repositories with 70TB size.
Diversion is a relatively new contender in the space; just like Perforce and Plastic, they advertise asset management, so large binary files common in game development.
AllSpice is not a real Git alternative but a very interesting addition to Git. It adds first class hardware support on a GitHub-like platform with file diffing for electronics design files like schematics and boards.
The world of version control for physical designs is fascinating in general. These systems are often tied to the design tool itself (like Solidworks PDM and Autodesk Vault).
Smaller Open Source Projects #
There are a number of smaller Git alternatives that should be mentioned.
Breezy is a fork of the abandoned GNU Bazaar. Grace is an approximately 2 year old system in development, implemented in F#. Pijul is developed in Rust, some of its interesting features are commutative changes, explicitly modeling merge conflicts and line-order preserving changes. Pijul has a GitHub like collaboration platform called Nest. Darcs is similar, written in Haskell, focusses on simplicity and allows collaboration on their Hub.
Future #
If I could choose the features for my ideal source control system, it would support very large repositories including large binary files, fine grained access control, and would allow me to work offline. It would support different workflows like pull requests and changelists.
Also, it would be to combine a source control system like Git and a build system like Bazel.
Imagine typing
gtb build <my_branch> //my/target
# or
gtb test <sha> //my/test
and the system only has to download the necessary files to build or test that specific version or spin up remote executor to run the requested task.
In a way today, tools like Git and Bazel overlap already. For incremental builds, Bazel identifies which files have changed using content hashing and metadata, just like a version control system, and then determines which actions need to be re-run based on the updated dependency graph.
Furthermore, users could see how their changes affect the build dependency graph, because the system tracks both file versions and the graph that describes how build artifacts are derived from sources. This could be valuable information for larger monorepos where code can cross domains from backend to frontend, and from firmware and mobile. One could ask what commits have contributed to changes in an application. This can be helpful in industries where traceability is important and where risk assessments have to be conducted for every release.
Switching gears back to engineering, action caches that speed up CI and save on compute when building and testing changes are gaining some traction. I think it would be pretty cool if we could retrieve artifacts from the cache just like we browse source code with Git.
Here is why: there are a number of use cases, where controlling sources is not enough: build outputs are important artifacts that need to be version controlled as well. Instead of a adding a separate system (these systems are sometimes called Product Lifecycle Management or PLM systems) I would love a tool that tracks both build inputs and outputs as first class concepts. And since the tool can differentiate between inputs and outputs, it can track sources and derived files separately or present them separately to users. No more littering the source directories with application builds, compiled libraries, firmware bundles, gerber files, G-code files, technical drawings, etc. next to source file. No more kludgy integrations with S3 or other artifact stores. If we could find a way to separate jupyter notebook output from the notebook itself, we could commit the notebook runs/output for tracing and sharing as well.
It would be interesting to see if something like this would be useful in machine learning workflows. I can imagine that reproducibility of experiments is an something people think about, maybe each experiment could be associated with a version which would hold every input and every output of the experiment without quite naturally.
I'm not sure how the UX would work for something like this, but if done correctly, I think it could be quite useful.