Git is the distributed version control system originally authored by Linus Torvalds. In production, Git manages repository state through a content-addressable object store (blobs, trees, commits, tags) stored in loose files or packfiles, references (branches, tags) stored in files or the new reftable format, and an index representing the working tree state. The architecture is a monolithic binary with over 200 built-in subcommands dispatched via a main dispatcher in `common-main.c`. Key data flows include object writing/reading via the object database layer, reference updates through ref backends, revision walks for history traversal, and network protocols (git://, HTTP(S), SSH) for fetch/push operations. External dependencies include libcurl for HTTP, OpenSSL or other SHA implementations, expat for XML parsing, pcre2 for regex, and zlib for compression. Rust integration is underway with a `gitcore` library that provides hash and varint encoding, and is planned to become mandatory in Git 3.0. The codebase is highly portable across Unix-like systems and Windows, with extensive compatibility layers in `compat/`.