Git Was Built for 2005, Not 2025: A New Storage Engine for Version Control
What Comes After Git
Steve Klabnik of East River Source Control argues that Git, designed for the Linux kernel in 2005, can't handle agentic development's ballooning repositories and merge contention. Their solution: keep the Git protocol but replace the storage layer with a horizontally scalable engine, then add a second protocol for Jujutsu (jj) so teams can adopt incrementally. Storage is the first building block of a modular VCS stack.
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.
- nrr
I'll echo the other comments here: this article is really anemic on the details of how ERSC intends to retool Git for the future (beyond Jujutsu as a migration path) or why there isn't a place for Git (as we know it) in the future[0].
I happen to have technical context around this problem[1], and I was rather underwhelmed by the announcement. At least mention how much of a pain in the ass the pack-protocol wire format is! Give those of us who are technical and knee-deep in Git's business something to commiserate over!
That all said, Fossil mentioned! \o/
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0: Yeah, they mention agentic development patterns and constraints that monorepo-oriented patterns run up against, but the details are handwaved away. What about agentic development patterns in particular stress Git out? For those of us who don't use agents or have limited exposure to them, this isn't especially obvious, but the usage patterns are almost certainly reflected in other uses of Git that small-ish shops would encounter.
1: I've even looked long and hard at possibly taking my own crack at reworking Git's object store to be instead more like an append-only log, with an eye toward alleviating some of the problems that, e.g., heavy GitOps workflows can sometimes cause, let alone the fervor around agentic development. Like, this space is ripe for someone to come in and do it better, but version control is a technical tool for technical people.
- rbsmith
This is more a response to many of the comments here than to the article, offering a perspective of what value they might bring.
I’ve spent about 35+ years in and around version control / SCM, with half of that being part of the BitKeeper team, where my job was to think about sets, graphs, and weaves in the context of a team making commercial customers’ lives better along with benefit to open source world.
If Git is good enough for you, know that it is not true for everybody. For some subset of that everybody, it’s worth paying to have that pain go away. And part of having that pain go away is being able to stay connected to all that is, to be enough of a superset of the current world, to not be better in an incompatible way. That’s what I see in the pictures Steve and team draw: world that interacts with Git in a way that is better for some willing to pay to have the pain go away.
I agree nothing much is being said about the Non-Git Storage Engine. As I’ve spent half of my life in that world, I get it: secret sauce. I don’t expect much to be said for a while.
- EddieRingle
Like the other comments, I'm very confused at what this is meant to do other than promote a wanna-be Git competitor and yet another hyper-specific "conference". The post doesn't really make any arguments, even in the section that's suppose to make an argument. And for some reason they're adding GraphQL into the mix, somehow?
- asmnzxklopqw
What problem are they trying to solve? This part is still not very clear to me.
- fergie
For me, the actual thing that git is not fantastic for is versioning data(bases), but this article doesn't seem to address that. In fact I am struggling to parse the article's proposed problem/solution.