To my knowledge it hasn’t been tried. It shouldn’t be too difficult to author a tool to do so, which could itself be made go-gettable. With this you’d avoid the mess of shipping an alternate build of the go tool and all that entails.

This project was fairly close to that idea:

https://github.com/cjb/GitTorrent

I think it’s abandoned though.

Yeah, the more I think about it the easier it seems.

You could probably write "plugins" or shims/wrappers for most package managers out there pretty easily.

And a great MVP would just be the ability to install from a magnet link.

I read somewhere that big companies use BitTorrent internally to update their codebase.

But yeah, I'd really like for someone to develop a VCS like that (even more if it's in Go, with no Cgo, and under BSD, MIT or Apache license). It'd make distribution, immutability and mirroring so much easier.

There is https://github.com/whyrusleeping/gx (based on IPFS instead of torrents, but they work extremely similarly for this use case)