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Why Facebook doesn’t use Git (graphite.dev)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/longreads

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Monorepos, performance problems, and a lot of asking

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I’m not a programmer and don’t know how to use git, but at least have a basic understanding of what its use is. I think the Closing Thoughts has a pertinent lesson that’s much broader:

I’m reminded of the classic wisdom that so many of history’s key technical decisions are human-driven, not technology-driven.

Facebook didn’t adopt Mercurial because it was more performant than Git. They adopted it because the maintainers and codebase felt more open to collaboration. Facebook engineers met face-to-face with Mercurial maintainers and liked the idea of partnering. When it came to persuading the whole engineering org, the decision got buy-in due to thoughtful communication - not because one technology was strictly better than another.

[–] conciselyverbose 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

They made a point of mentioning the clarity and extensibility of the Python codebase as well (not sure if it was the article of the original blog) as making it easier to modify. They could have forked the code if they thought git was clearly better.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I wouldn’t expect web devs to know C.