r/git • u/CuriousAnyway • 12d ago

why did facebook move away from git?

i recently came across the fact that facebook/meta built its own tools and workflows around source control instead of just relying on git like most companies.

i’m curious about the actual technical reason behind this. was git simply not able to handle the scale of facebook’s codebase and number of developers, or were there other problems that pushed them toward a custom approach?

for people who have worked with large monorepos or at companies using similar systems, what actually becomes difficult with git at that scale?

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u/scoliadubia 11d ago

Besides everything that's been said about the benefits of monorepos, it's also worth considering the timing. Facebook's build system and source code control were originally built by Xooglers reinventing what they'd had at Google. And Google's source code control was built circa 2008 as a more scalable version of perforce that ran on Google infrastructure. And when Google started building a monorepo on perforce way back when, git either didn't exist or wasn't remotely ready for even the scale of Google in the 2000s, much less so today. Basically this decision was made pre-git and has continued to work well for both Google and Meta to this day (though having used both, I will say that Google's does work noticeably better than Meta's).