HN

Need help?
<- Back
Walgit – a Git server that is one binary in front of an object store

Walgit – a Git server that is one binary in front of an object store

matallo

Comments (55)

  • depr
  • p-o
    This is going to be a meta comment, my apologies.But I now understand the growth in Github's activity that led to its instability recently. Folks just see a project (Cursor's Origin), open up a claude session with a couple harness, and just throw a lot of money, and external energy at generating what will most likely end up being garbage.But this garbage looks and feels good at the onset, and so a few iterations happen, more PRs, more commits until it dies down.In the end, almost nothing of value was created, it was just machine creating stuff for other machines, while humans were mostly spectators of an illusion.Rinse and repeat.
  • themgt
    We've created Walinux, a Linux that runs as a durable object in S3, so it's diskless, serverless, transistorless, electricity-less, scales to zero and infinity simultaneously, and can be traded as an NFT ape. Mathematicians are dumbfounded.The thirty-five thousand other "S3-backed CLI tool for AI" projects are now obsolete.
  • delf
    You can use GitSocial CLI to push git repositories straight to S3 without any dependencies: https://gitsocial.org/.The buckets then are actual remotes and double as static sites. GitSocial website itself is hosted on Cloudflare R2.
  • 0123456789ABCDE
    underlying idea of storing git repositories in object stores is identical to https://github.com/tigrisdata/objgitsee: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48661938
  • ShinyLeftPad
    Just show us the prompt(s) ;)
  • gravypod
    Is there a market for an actual GitHub competitor now that everyone is looking around and is very angry about stability?
  • fasdarasa2000
    Please camouflage Claude use a little bit better, the README is so cringe it makes it actually hard to understand what the value proposition really is
  • zoobab
    Tarballs over FTP was better.
  • the_alchemist
    I'm confused by the usage of the word consensus in the explanation, to me it seems like a last-write-wins strategy, no consensus involved?
  • baalimago
    I am working on a very similar mcp server which allows agents to communicate and share notes without race conditions, using git and s3 as the driver [0]. Funny how "inventions" like these pop up independently.[0]: slivingdoc.dev
  • lionkor
    I struggle very much to understand the "why".There's a git server, it's installed when you install git, and it really does work very well.> every instance is a disposable cache that revalidates with one conditional GET. No database, no Redis, no gossip, no leader, no node identity.Git famously doesn't use that either...? What is the point?> "just put the repositories on NFS" failed at every large host that tried itYeah, that's a terrible idea. You can just host Git on a server or two. Where's the limit? How much does it scale to put a single 64 core server with a 10 gbit link on a local network and put ONLY git on it? Is that really that slow and bad? You can give it 20+ TB of RAID storage for VERY cheap. What is the limit you're hitting? 200ms ping to it from across the world? Is that the issue we're solving?> walgit takes that as-is, and adds what a monorepo on small machines needs: serving refs and web pages for a repository whose packs will never fit on the instance (a remote reader over HTTP range requests), keeping commits and trees local while blobs stay in the bucket (the history pack), and moving clone bytes out of the server entirely (bundle-uri: fresh clones and catch-ups are static files the bucket or a CDN hands out).So it's about monorepos that, for some reason, have blobs large enough to be impossible to serve via range requests, shallow clones, etc? Are people committing binary blobs of 1TB+ to their git? There's Git LFS, that hooks up an object store (like S3) to git for large files.As an aside, I kind of adore that Tobi's latest post on his website, from 2019, talks about shopify's carbon emissions, meanwhile today his github is full of AI slop projects and enabling others to "vibe" even harder. He also missed that his clanker wrote an announcement post; https://github.com/tobi/walgit/blob/main/docs/announcing-wal...
  • rtcode_io
  • jauntywundrkind
    Conditional Put (often called compare and swap) shipped 21 months ago, and it has just been absolutely wild the massive flocking towards disaggregated storage, towards object stores that has been going on since then. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42240678 https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2024/11/amazon-s3...PicoMQ also showing up today, a Durable Streams implementation on object store (S3). https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49421806 https://picomq.com/Celld, a Durable Objects implementation, is also heavily heavily using conditional put, for all manners of coordination. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49185430 https://celld.devLongstanding SlateDB is built around it too! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41714858 https://slatedb.io/Yet another fine example here! Data comes in, we make sure we don't overwrite work, we write what we have.
  • bluerooibos
    Oh cool, vibe-coded slop from Tobi Lutke, the right-wing fash CEO who wants wealthy folks' votes [1] to carry more weight than the rest of us (the plebs) - no thanks[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/shopify-ceo-endorses-idea-to-...
  • tccole
    Very cool! I might use this later
  • glemmaPaul
    If you use Rust I just immediately think you were a crypto grifter as well
  • icase
    i thought tobi was too based to use a trash language like rust
  • scosman
    Note this is from tobi, Shopify CEOAmazing he still codes. But likely more experiment than prod level.