alt Hacker News> I'm so glad git won the dvcs war. There was a solid decade where mercurial kept promoting itself as "faster than git".
It wasn't the Mercurial team saying it was faster than Git; that was Facebook after contributing a bunch of patches after testing Mercurial on their very large mono-repo in 2014 [1]:
For our repository, enabling Watchman integration has made Mercurial’s status command more than 5x faster than Git’s status command. Other commands that look for changed files–like diff, update, and commit—also became faster.
In fact they liked Mercurial so much they essentially cloned it to create their own dvcs, Sapling [2]. (An aside: Facebook did all of this because it was taking too long getting new engineers up to speed with Git. Shocker.)
Today, most of the core of Mercurial has been rewritten in Rust; when Facebook did their testing, Mercurial was nearly 100% Python. That's where the "Mercurial is slow" thing came from; launching a large Python 2.x app took a while back in the day.
I was messing with an old Mercurial repo recently… it was like a breath of fresh air. If I can push to GitHub using Mercurial… sign me up.
[1]: https://engineering.fb.com/2014/01/07/core-infra/scaling-mer...
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No, the "hg is fast" marketing claim that retreated to "hg is Big-O fast and you are dumb for caring about constant terms and factors even if they clearly dominate your use case" predates 2014 and the Facebook patches. These talking points were old in 2010. Mercurial was always dog slow and always gaslighting about it.
I'm glad BigCo made tools to serve their needs, but their needs aren't my needs or most peoples' needs.
> Mercurial has been rewritten in Rust
I'm glad they saw the light eventually! Ditto for the rest of the Rust Tooling Renaissance.
You can push to GitHub using Sapling. I wish Sapling open source was given more love, as the experience for non-Facebookers is subpar. No bash completion outside the box, no distro packages, no good help pages, random issues interacting with a Git repo...