Keyboard shortcuts

Press ← or → to navigate between chapters

Press S or / to search in the book

Press ? to show this help

Press Esc to hide this help

Prior art

Grovedock builds on ideas that large engineering organisations have described in public. No code from any of these systems was used. This page credits them, records what each one proved, and sets the bar Grovedock measures itself against.

SystemOrganisationPublished scaleIdeas Grovedock sharesOpen source?
Piper and Clients in the Cloud (CitC)Google~1 billion files, ~35 million commits, 86 TB (2015) 1Server holds history; workspaces show the whole tree but store only what you changeNo
Sapling, Mononoke, EdenFSMetaRepositories with millions of files and very long histories 2Operations scale with the files you use, not the repository; lazy virtual checkoutsClient yes; Mononoke and EdenFS not supported for outside use 3
VFS for Git (GVFS) and ScalarMicrosoftWindows: ~3.5 million files, ~300 GB repository (2017) 4Fetch only what is used; virtualize the working directoryYes (MIT), git-based
Redesigning source controlAnthropicTens of thousands of merges a day from humans and agents 5Server-side commits and rebases, lock-free landing, tiered caches, API-first readsNo

What Grovedock adds

  • Open source and self-hosted under Apache-2.0: one binary on a laptop with SQLite, or stateless replicas on Postgres/CockroachDB and S3/GCS/Azure.
  • Agent-native interfaces: a built-in MCP server and SDKs in Python, Go and TypeScript.
  • Plain git keeps working through a two-way remote helper; import and export round-trip with identical trees, so there is no lock-in.
  • Pluggable everything: every infrastructure piece is a port with a shared contract suite, and every source-control feature has a runtime flag.
  • Measured in public: the benchmarks are reproducible from public data with the scripts in bench/ and the examples in crates/pando/examples/.

Where these systems are ahead

They run in production at a scale Grovedock has not yet been tested at, with years of operating experience and integrated code review, search and build tooling. Grovedock is new. The benchmarks in docs/comparisons/git-vs-pando.md and larger-scale runs still to come are how it earns comparison, one public dataset at a time.

  1. Potvin and Levenberg, Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository, Communications of the ACM, July 2016. Figures from January 2015; the file count includes release branches and deleted files. ↩

  2. Meta Engineering, Sapling: Source control that’s user-friendly and scalable, November 2022. ↩

  3. facebook/sapling README. ↩

  4. Brian Harry, The largest Git repo on the planet, May 2017. ↩

  5. Anthropic Engineering, Redesigning source control at Anthropic. ↩