Why did Linus Torvalds write Git in just a few weeks?
A license dispute left the Linux team without their tool, so Torvalds wrote a replacement that was self-hosting within days.
▶ Start the storyTorvalds wrote Git in a rush because he had to. Until April 2005, the Linux team used BitKeeper, a tool. When its free was revoked for Linux, the team lost the way they shared work, and Torvalds found that no existing tool met his needs. So he started Git on 3 April 2005. Four days after he began, it was already hosting its own development.
The speed target was extreme. Torvalds pointed to a tool that took 30 seconds to apply one , while a maintainer might need 250 such actions at once. He demanded that a patch take no more than three seconds. He also wanted a distributed workflow like BitKeeper's, very strong safeguards against corruption, and, as a design principle, the opposite of what CVS did when in doubt. Those goals ruled out every system in use at the time.
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The result moved fast. Torvalds announced the project on 6 April, the first merge of several branches happened on 18 April, and by 29 April Git recorded patches to the at 6.7 patches per second. By 16 June it was managing a kernel release.
Why has a tool made in a hurry lasted? Git's central idea is that every developer holds the full history, and branches are very lightweight, because a branch is only a reference to one commit. In 2022 nearly 95% of developers reported it as their main tool. The name is a joke Torvalds made at his own expense, since git is British slang for an unpleasant or silly person.
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Recap
Git was built in weeks because the Linux team lost BitKeeper and no free tool was fast, distributed and safe enough.
💡 A trick to remember it · A lost tool, a three-second target, a few weeks of work: Git is what you build when the old tool is taken away.
Surprising fact · Git was self-hosting four days after development began.
Sources (3)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (17 claims) cites at least one of these.