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Comment by parhamn | Hacker News Reader

Have you ever tried it? It's not remotely performant and wouldn't make sense since GH is read heavy. Plus I'm sure they spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff, no?

If you want to get your feet wet, check out go-git[1]. It's a native golang implementation of git. They have a storage layer abstracted over a lean interface that you quickly create alternative drivers for in golang. You'll be effectively implementing poorly sharded file system on a database, then it becomes obvious why scaling the FS is just easier.

[1] https://github.com/go-git/go-git/tree/master/storage

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> Plus I'm sure they spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff, no?

I think this is unfair - the author was not insinuating that the people who designed this system at Github are stupid in some way, but just asking if other architectures have been considered.

> ...Github are stupid in some way, but just asking if other architectures have been considered.

To me, asking an engineering org if they’ve considered alternative architectures for their main engineering problem is silly at best, overconfident at worst.

I think the main point of the comment was asking why they decided against it. At one point the wording mildly suggests the possibility that no one at github has thought about it:

> I would love to know if something like this has been considered and why the decided against it.

... but that still sounds more like a grammatical hedge than an actual suggestion that github didn't think it through.

imo it's fair to lay out why you're surprised about some decision in the hopes that someone will enlighten you, even if it can be tricky to phrase that without coming off like a "why didn't you just..." comment.

Sure, but also sometimes the only way to learn is to ask.

> but just asking if other architectures have been considered.

That’s the polite way of calling them stupids ;)

They're just expressing curiosity. Jeeze.

The problem with recognizing that a lot of phrasings are just the polite way to call someone stupid/tell someone to fuck off/etc is that you start seeing assholes whenever someone is just trying to be polite. :(

He is literally actually insinuating the GitHub team have not architected things correctly.

He didn’t even open with a question, rather he opened with a statement. I don’t think there is even a question mark in the post as it stands right now.

I hate tiptoeing around to avoid offence, but it would have been better to frame the post as a question, it would likely avoided people reading negative intent behind the post.

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