How Cursor beat Git's scalability shortcomings
Article excerpt
DEVOPS S3 keeps the source of truth while local NVMe repositories do the latency-sensitive work Developers recently burned by GitHub’s system outages should take note that there are other ways to manage Git at scale. One approach, recently put into action by Cursor, is to build the distributed version control system on object storage. A recent post from Cursor principal systems engineer Vicent Martí explains how the SpaceX subsidiary worked through its scaling issues with the notoriously fickle Git distributed version control system. The post explains how Cursor arrived at an architecture for its own Git-based repository service called Origin, which is powered by an internal engine called Continuity. A beta of the service is available with paid Cursor plans. “Agents have fundamentally changed the way we work with software, and in many ways they've made this situation worse. More code, more PRs, more CI runs. Version control is at the core of all of this, and it is possibly the hardest thing to change overnight,” Martí wrote. Martí speaks from experience, having worked at GitHub through much of the last decade when the company arrived at its own current architecture for managing Git. Git creator Linus Torvalds designed his software to work as a content-addressable data store, where all the objects are stored and indexed by the SHA-1 hash of their contents. Git sees a...
Keep reading with a free account
The rest of this article, and every signal for Cursor, is in your free account.
Extracted from this sentence
With Origin, pushes are uploaded into S3 in a write-ahead log (WAL), capturing all changes as immutable objects.
