microsoft

git

C2017–2025

microsoft / git

git

A fork of Git containing Microsoft-specific patches.

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17Distinct people

18Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

910GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A fork of Git containing Microsoft-specific patches.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

microsoft/scalar · linked in 5 of the same discussions
microsoft/vfsforgit · linked in 2 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 11:56:56 AM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year18 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2017-10-20 19:10:31 UTC to 2025-03-17 17:41:51 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2	2
2022	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	7	7
2023	2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	3	3
2024	2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
2025	2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

18 sources

bastardoperator·Mar 17, 2025

Have you looked into Scalar? It's built into MSFT git and designed to deal with repos that are much larger internally. microsoft/git is focused on addressing these performance woes and making the monorepo developer experience first-class. The Scalar CLI packages all of these recommendations into a simple set of commands. https://github.com/microsoft/scalar https://github.com/microsoft/git

In Going down the rabbit hole of Git's new bundle-URI

tux3·Oct 27, 2024

For those wondering where this new git-survey command is, it's actually not in git.git yet! The author is using microsoft's git fork, they've added this new command just this summer: https://github.com/microsoft/git/pull/667

In We shrunk our Javascript monorepo git size

est31·Dec 11, 2023

Microsoft had a bunch of solutions to handle their massive Windows repo: VFS for Git (GVFS), Scalar, and now it has a bunch of MS specific patches on top of the official git client, but apparently that one is also not required any more as partial clone is now supported on azure as well (which is another such implementation from Microsoft employees that made it to both GitHub and upstream git). So yeah, solved problem thanks to Microsoft. Solved multiple times in fact, and because it's Microsoft, only not all had Linux installers: https://github.com/microsoft/scalar/issues/323#issuecomment-... https://github.blog/2020-01-17-bring-your-monorepo-down-to-s... https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/introducing-scalar/ https://github.com/microsoft/git https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/git-partial-clone-now-...

In Ask HN: Can we do better than Git for version control?

MikusR·Aug 28, 2023

Their fork https://github.com/microsoft/git

In We put half a million files in one Git repository (2022)

TiredOfLife·Aug 28, 2023

That was discontinued (like multiple times under different names). And is moved into a git fork. https://github.com/microsoft/git

In We put half a million files in one Git repository (2022)

idoubtit·Nov 16, 2022

Microsoft uses monorepos, and you have access to Microsoft's tools! They chose to work with Git and amend it when necessary, just like Meta did with Mercurial. A few years ago they had a Virtual File System extension for Git. Now it's a public fork of Git that is intended for large repositories (several hundreds of GB). It adds a `git scalar` command, see https://github.com/microsoft/git/blob/HEAD/contrib/scalar/do...

In Sapling: A new source control system with Git-compatible client

infogulch·Jun 30, 2022

Interesting! It seems some of Scalar from late 2021 has already made it into the official git project's contrib dir [0]. It looks like Scalar is mostly an opinionated way to configure git [1] using git partial-clone among other features. Git partial-clone looks almost perfect, except it only downloads and displays files explicitly added to the git sparse-checkout list. I want some "magic" vfs shenanigans that lets me view and browse the full repo exactly as if the full repo where checked out, but when I open a directory or file the contents are downloaded on-demand. [0]: https://github.com/git/git/tree/master/contrib/scalar [1]: https://github.com/microsoft/git/blob/vfs-2.37.0/Documentati...

In Improve Git monorepo performance with a file system monitor

dafelst·Jun 30, 2022

This has been superceded by Scalar (https://github.com/microsoft/scalar) and again merged into Microsoft's fork of git (https://github.com/microsoft/git) It supports neat stuff like partial clone which seems like a pretty big deal.

In Improve Git monorepo performance with a file system monitor

mpawelski·Jun 29, 2022

This is awesome. Especially the fact that it's built-in and easy to turn on. Seams like quite a complex solution though. I guess some big company (Microsoft?) implemented it internally for their own use and later tried to move it to upstream git. I wonder if there was some pushback from git maintainers from having this functionality built-in. Also why for Windows they use named pipes when in theory Windows also supports it? (https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/af_unix-comes-to-...) BTW, to the author of this article. It is very good. It was an interesting read. The are some small issues: - "markdown" link didn't get converted to html: "[core.untrackedcache](https://git-scm.com/docs/git-config#Documentation/git-config...)" - the link to "philosophy" of Scalar doesn't work: https://github.com/microsoft/git/blob/HEAD/contrib/scalar/do

Read the rest

...

In Improve Git monorepo performance with a file system monitor

MikusR·Apr 13, 2022

First it was https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit then replaced with https://github.com/microsoft/scalar and then into their git fork https://github.com/microsoft/git

In Eden

dharmab·Mar 24, 2022

Ironically, Microsoft has been a major contributor to improvements in git for handling large repos after Windows was migrated to git. https://github.com/microsoft/git

In GitHub incident: 2022/03/24

jamesfinlayson·Jan 27, 2022

300GB git repo... anyway, good to see there's work for merge in back to git proper, though it seems like that is still a work in progress (maybe) as https://github.com/Microsoft/git/ still seems pretty active.

In The largest Git repo on the planet (2017)

anon9001·Nov 11, 2021

This is well written and deserves my upvote, because sparse-checkout is part of git and knowing how it works is useful. That said, there's absolutely no reason to structure your code in a monorepo. Here's what I think GitHub is doing: 1) Encourage monorepo adoption 2) Build tooling for monorepos 3) Selling tooling to developers stranded in monorepos Microsoft, which owns GitHub, created the microsoft/git fork linked in the article, and they explain their justification here: https://github.com/microsoft/git#why-is-this-fork-needed > Well, because Git is a distributed version control system, each Git repository has a copy of all files in the entire history. As large repositories, aka monorepos grow, Git can struggle to manage all that data. As Git commands like status and fetch get slower, developers stop waiting and start switching cont

Read the rest

ext. And context switches harm developer productivity. I believe that Google's brand is so big that it led to this mass cognitive dissonance, which is being exploited by GitHub. To be clear, here are the two ideas in conflict: * Git is decentralized and fast, and Google famously doesn't use it. * Companies want to use "industry standard" tech, and Google is the standard for success. Now apply those observations to a world where your engineers only use "git". The result is market demand to misuse git for monorepos, which Microsoft is pouring huge amounts of resources into enabling via GitHub. It makes great sense that GitHub wants to lean into this. More centralization and being more reliant on GitHub's custom tooling is obviously better for GitHub. It just so happens that GitHub is building tools to enable monorepos, essentially normalizing their usage. Then GitHub can sell tools to deal with your enormous monorepo, because your traditional tools will feel slow and worse than GitHub's tools. In other words, GitHub is propping up the failed monorepo idea as a strategy to get people in the pipeline for things like CodeSpaces: https://github.com/features/codespaces Because if you have 100 projects and they're all separate, you can do development locally for each and it's fast and sensible. But if all your projects are in one repo, the tools grind to a halt, and suddenly you need to buy a solution that just works to meet your business goals.

In Make your monorepo feel small with Git’s sparse index

mikevm·Aug 22, 2021

VFS for Git was superceded by https://github.com/microsoft/scalar and then many of the features were merged into mainline git, so what is left now is a thin shell around git features in the form of MS's forked git binary: https://github.com/microsoft/git

In Gitfs: Version Controlled File System

stolee·Jul 18, 2018

Earlier this year, we considered similar changes to the ahead/behind calculation in 'git status'. We concluded that there is no good way to provide partial information. Specifically, you can't say "10 ahead" without walking everything you are behind to find all merge-bases. That "10" you found could become smaller by walking more of the other set. We instead opted to not calculate that information as often. Here is my reply to the thread on-list that summarizes why I think this direction is futile: https://public-inbox.org/git/20180108154822.54829-1-git@jeff... This ahead/behind calculation is in a lot of places, including 'git fetch' where it checks if each ref update was a forced update (checks if the new ref value has the old ref value in its history). For our version of Git that ships with GVFS, we added an option to skip this check,

Read the rest

providing a significant speedup to users fetch times: https://github.com/Microsoft/git/commit/9616c7da3141f539a425...

In Supercharging the Git Commit Graph IV: Bloom Filters

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