East River Source Control (ERSC) has been quietly working on advancing version control technology to meet the demands of contemporary software development. While no formal product announcement has been made, ERSC shared insights into their approach to evolving version control systems (VCS) beyond Git.
Software development today is highly collaborative and increasingly complex, with projects growing from small codebases to massive monorepos containing billions of lines of code. Traditional version control tools like Git, designed in the mid-2000s primarily for open source projects such as the Linux kernel, face limitations handling the scale and speed of modern workflows. The rise of agentic development—where automated agents generate and manage code—further strains existing systems by increasing repository sizes, branch counts, and merge conflicts.
ERSC recognizes that while Git remains deeply embedded in development tooling and workflows, its architecture is not optimized for future scalability and organizational needs. To bridge this gap, ERSC is building a system that continues to support the Git protocol for client interactions but replaces the underlying repository storage with a custom, horizontally scalable engine. This design aims to improve performance, reliability, and control by isolating deployments and avoiding the constraints of traditional Git repository storage.
The company also highlights the potential to support multiple protocols in the future, inspired by tools like Jujutsu (jj), which can interface with various backends while maintaining compatibility with Git repositories. This flexibility could allow gradual adoption of new version control features without disrupting existing workflows.
ERSC emphasizes that their solution is not a monolithic software forge but a modular platform designed to integrate with diverse development tools such as code review systems and continuous integration pipelines. Storage is the foundational component, with plans to offer additional products that can be combined with third-party tools or ERSC’s own offerings.
While these innovations are still under development and not yet available, ERSC plans to share more details soon and engage with the community at upcoming events. Their approach reflects a cautious yet forward-looking strategy to evolve version control infrastructure in response to the changing landscape of software engineering.