Microsoft develops, uses open source GIT Virtual File System to build Windows

Earlier this year, Microsoft announced that their transition to open source has been an undertaking. While the tech giant intends to push the availability of their data on a broader scale through GitHub, Microsoft had admitted difficulty with the sheer scale. Git, after all, wasn’t created for such massive files systems.

Enter the Git Virtual File System, Microsft’s way to maintain the 3.5 million files for Windows. Three months later after the announcement of their transition to the GVFS, nearly 4,000 engineers have transitioned their work over to the new Windows Git making it the largest repository available (via TechCrunch.)

Originally, the Windows OneCore team held baited breath on March 22nd when 2,000 engineers had completely transitioned to the Git experience. Since then, Windows has slowly been transitioning more and more engineers into the repository, processing some impressive numbers daily.

• There are over 250,000 reachable Git commits in the history for this repo, over the past 4 months.
• 8,421 pushes per day (on average)
• 2,500 pull requests, with 6,600 reviewers per work day (on average)
• 4,352 active topic branches
• 1,760 official builds per day

Adding onto the availability as an open source project and improving behind the scenes, Microsoft also took the opportunity to improve the Git proxies. The transition was so game changing for Windows that their recent blog post states other tech companies like Google and Facebook may be interested in learning from the new GVFS for future use.