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Comment by mprev | Hacker News Reader

The battle seemed to be between Bazaar and Mercurial for so long. Both were easy-ish to use and both were written in Python.

Mercurial usually had the speed advantage but then git came along and wasn’t written in Python. Speed wise it blew Bazaar and Mercurial out of the water.

It was harder to learn for someone used to svn, perhaps, but the sheer weight of both Linus and Linux made it hard to ignore.

I think GitHub deserve a lot of the credit for git’s omnipresence, though. With Launchpad our aim was to create something bigger than “just” a code sharing site and fairly or unfairly both Launchpad and Bazaar were seen as too close to Canonical. Whereas GitHub picked up the mantle that Sourceforge had dropped and made something way more collaborative than Sourceforge but held onto the idea of being a neutral third party.

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> Speed wise it blew Bazaar and Mercurial out of the water.

Benchmarks for this are hard to come by, and are for versions that are considered quite outdated now. But from what little there is, there wasn't that much of a performance difference between git and hg. For example, see this: https://www.draketo.de/proj/hg-vs-git-server/test-results.ht...

Well, sure they’re outdated because we’re talking about stuff that happened at least ten years ago.

As for benchmarks, I don’t have any but there’s plenty of anecdata elsewhere in this thread that echoes the idea that git had significant speed advantages over both bzr and hg.

Fair, but that misses a bunch of short-running simple operations where hg does badly; things like "print the repo root" or "print the current branch name" take several milliseconds in Git, but Mercurial needs an order of magnitude longer (see e.g. https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/OxidationPlan for some description of the issues there). Doesn't seem like much, but those add up, especially when they're wrapped up into other scripts that might run several of those in sequence.

Thanks for the link. I was not aware that hg on windows was that painful, plus all the dll hell that makes it hard for Rustification.

Yes, there is a penalty of starting and stopping the Python interpreter every time, which is why they want to implement the front end command in Rust. For scripts, current users are better off adapting to the current hg ecosystem, and writing their scripts in Python.

>both Launchpad and Bazaar were seen as too close to Canonical

I think it's more that Launchpad is terribad. No matter how much I used it, I struggled to get to the code so I could read it. It looks like it's been somewhat fixes now with a small "Browse the code" link on the project landing site. It used to be like 4 clicks if you knew what to look for.

And when I used bazaar (on Arch in 2004 trying to contribute to Exaile), it would pin a core and make no progress. I didn't look at it again.

Bazaar... now there's a name I've tried to forget.

I think my history went something like this:

RCS -> CVS, CVS -> SVN, SVN -> Darcs, Darcs -> Mercurial, then Mercurial -> Git.

Bazaar I had to use for interactions with Ubuntu, but never in a serious way. Similarly I used a few other things such as Visual Source Safe (shudder), SCCS, and even BitKeeper, but I think they were used quite shallowly.

Mercurial and git started the same month.

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