Gabe Aul pushes his own red button with the release of Git Virtual File System

The former Windows Insider program lead isn’t done pushing big red buttons just yet. Gabriel Aul, now the Vice President of the Windows and Devices Group (WDG) Engineering Systems, helped to announce some of the latest tech behind the scenes at Microsoft: the Git Virtual File System (GVFS).

For those who ask what I've been working on, here's a bit. We're moving our SCM to Git and invented a bit of tech:   https://t.co/rQdcOx6wI5

— Gabriel Aul (@GabeAul) February 3, 2017

Microsoft’s shift to becoming more open source has been a major play for its software and product development. But even their teams admit that the Git client wasn’t really able to meet their needs when it came to speed. According to the announcement post, the Windows codebase has over 3.5 mill files and runs up to 270GB. “This Git client was never designed to work with

“This Git client was never designed to work with repos with that many files or that much content,” the post explained. “You can see that in action when you run “git checkout” and it takes up to 3 hours, or even a simple “git status” takes almost 10 minutes to run.”

So instead of giving up and leaving Git altogether, Microsoft decided to build it up. The GVFS cuts down hours into minutes exponentially. This is because the files are only downloaded the first time they are opened instead of having to download everything that may be unnecessary.

Even GVFS is open source on GitHub, so if that’s something that interests you, go ahead and check it out.