Comment by senkora
3 days ago
> Microsoft had to collaborate with GitHub to invent the Virtual File System for Git (VFS for Git) just to make this migration possible. Without VFS, a fresh clone of the Office repository (a shallow git clone would take 200 GB of disk space) would take days and consume hundreds of gigabytes.
It takes less than an hour on my third world apartment wifi to download Call of Duty Modern Warfare remake which is over 200 gygabytes. Since we're not talking about remote work here, I think Microsoft offices and servers (probably on local network) might have managed similar bandwidth back then.
There is a lot more to it than that. Check out "The largest Git repo on the planet" by Brian Harry who was in charge of the git migration and Azure DevOps (Microsoft's pendant to GitHub)
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-o...
> For context, if we tried this with “vanilla Git”, before we started our work, many of the commands would take 30 minutes up to hours and a few would never complete. The fact that most of them are less than 20 seconds is a huge step but it still sucks if you have to wait 10-15 seconds for everything. When we first rolled it out, the results were much better. That’s been one of our key learnings. If you read my post that introduced GVFS, you’ll see I talked about how we did work in Git and GVFS to change many operations from being proportional to the number of files in the repo to instead be proportional to the number of files “read”. It turns out that, over time, engineers crawl across the code base and touch more and more stuff leading to a problem we call “over hydration”. Basically, you end up with a bunch of files that were touched at some point but aren’t really used any longer and certainly never modified. This leads to a gradual degradation in performance. Individuals can “clean up” their enlistment but that’s a hassle and people don’t, so the system gets slower and slower.
Great quote from him here.
Having had yesterday the dubious pleasure of using MS Word for the first time in a decade, I can safely affirm that they could have have just piped the whole Office repo to the Windows equivalent of /dev/null and nothing of value would have been lost.
The worst part about Word is that it has been feature complete since Office 97, except they've made the UI worse each and every version since then. I wish I could get excited about a new version of Office or WordPerfect, but neither Microsoft or Corel has figured out how to innovate in the past three decades. And no, slapping """AI""" in there isn't the solution. There are so many possibities but they just sort of do nothing with it now that they make a few billion a month on Microsoft 365 subscriptions.