Disclaimer: I am not a git developer, nor have I ever written anything FUSE. So I apologize if the following is idiotic:
I've been looking for a virtual file system (in Linux) that works with git to make huge working directories fast. I have found that Microsoft has written GVFS in Windows for this purpose. I read in a forum a discussion where they said using a FUSE implementation was too slow and that they had to write a full file system at the kernel level to be fast enough. Their web page also boasts that a checkout takes 30 seconds rather than 3 hours. My question is why? If a FUSE was implemented in a way where a git checkout would do nothing more than copy the snapshot manifest file locally, wouldn't that basically be instantaneous? The file system could then fetch files by the hashes within that manifest whenever one needed to be read. Files would only need to be stored locally if it they were modified. Since the file system would know exactly what files were modified, then it seems that git status and commit would be fast as well. Perhaps MS implemented GVFS that way because building a big tree from scratch would be slow if it had to go into user space over and over again? If so, then what if a build system like Bazel (from Google) was used to always build everything incrementally? It too could be modified (maybe via plugin) to interact with the file system to know exactly what files changed without reading everything. The file system could also use Google's hashes and remote caching to provide unmodified binary content just like it would use git's SHA1 to provide unmodified source content from git. So when a user did a checkout, it would appear that all the binaries were committed along the source code. Bazel would build new binaries from the source that was modified, and only those new binaries would be written locally. To execute those binaries, most of them would be read from the cache while new ones would be read locally. Perhaps that runtime part is the issue? Executing the resulting code was too slow due to the slower file access? I would think that hit would not be too bad, and only be during init, but perhaps I'm wrong. Microsoft is full of really smart guys. So clearly I am missing something. What is it? (Sorry if I'm wasting your time)
