Git merges aren't really merges in the sense that they store a delta produced by some kind of N-way merge algorithm. A git commit is essentially a full copy of

Git merges aren't really merges in the sense that they store a delta produced by some kind of N-way merge algorithm. A git commit is essentially a full copy of a tree where the parents are stored as simple metadata attributes. The parent links are used by tools like "git log" to show how code evolved. But that evolution is calculated on the fly from the difference between trees. In the data model of git, a 66-way merge is therefore nothing special. It's simply a tree with 66 parent links.