Home > Positioning > Subjects > Git > Ecosystem and adoption

Ecosystem and adoption

Git is the dominant version-control system: by the early 2020s developer surveys put its use among professionals at roughly 95%, displacing the centralised systems (CVS, Subversion) and the competitors (Mercurial, Perforce) that preceded or accompanied it.

Hosting

Much of Git’s reach comes through hosting platforms that add collaboration around the bare protocol — pull/merge requests, issues, review, continuous integration. The largest are GitHub (the market leader), GitLab, Bitbucket, and SourceForge; these are services built on top of Git, not Git itself.

Implementations

The canonical implementation is the C “core Git” maintained by Junio Hamano at git.kernel.org under GPL-2.0; the trademark is held by the Software Freedom Conservancy. Independent implementations include libgit2 (a portable C library with bindings for many languages), JGit (Java; used by Eclipse and Gerrit), go-git (Go), and isomorphic-git (pure JavaScript, for Node and the browser).

Reach beyond code

Git’s content-addressed, history-preserving model has been taken up well beyond source code — for configuration, infrastructure-as-code, documentation, and data — wherever versioned, verifiable, decentralised state is useful.

Sources