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Comment by AbacusAvenger | Hacker News Reader

How many applications are left that still use Mercurial? I can only think of two big ones, the JDK and Mozilla's entire code base. Are there still others around? Seems like everyone's moving to Git these days, which is great considering I never did get the hang of Mercurial.

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> I never did get the hang of Mercurial

What is it specific that you dont get ? I actually thought hg is conceptually simpler.

And hg to me has always felt BSD like, Git was Linux like. Unfortunately everything with BSD failed to gain any popularity. Including BSD license in itself. ( Yes I know Netflix are using it in their Edge Appliance )

bookmarks and branches.

Coming from git to hg, it was a step back in time to branches that can’t ever actually be deleted and bookmarks are... not obvious.

Can you actually create two bookmarks on your current commit and then move forward on just one? who knows? I never figured it out.

It's a bit odd that there's such a monoculture around git though, where are the competitors?

Should we care about a monoculture around a local used/hosted, open source tool?

I might worry about a monoculture around a hosted service like github, but not git itself.

Yes, we should. Remember when GCC had no open source competition? Things have been much better since clang came out.

Or consider openssl since libressl came out. Yes it's possible that codebase improvements would have happened anyways, but having open source competition is great.

I'm sorry because both the ui and the underlying model of Mercurial is factually Better than git

> is factually Better than git

It obviously isn't 'factually' better - that's a matter of opinion not fact.

And in my experience, both Mercurial's model and UI is very over-complicated with far too many concepts. Git has a smaller number of simpler primitives and primitive operations. I think that makes the underlying model of Git better and that's why I prefer it.

I would love a competitor with significant benefits. Git has plenty of warts.

As it stands, it's just a lot easier to use Git everywhere though, just so developers don't have to learn a new tool.

https://pijul.org/ is the only somewhat somewhat interesting alternative I know about, but it's implementation is in alpha territory, and development seems dead.

As one of the authors, I can tell you that Pijul development has never been as alive as today. It isn't public yet for a variety of reasons, but will be very soon.

May I suggest that you write something like that on the webpage? It looks really disappointing with the last activity from 2019 at the moment

That's great to hear!

Pijul is an interesting young alternative: https://pijul.org/

Not huge but libsdl was one of the ones I ran into recently. (I’ve seen a couple of Subversions too, since I’m visiting a lot of open source projects these days.)

PyPy uses Mercurial, hosted on a Gitlab fork https://doc.pypy.org/en/latest/contributing.html#source-cont...

NGINX still uses Mercurial

Facebook?

It's quite a bit different from stock hg at this point. The server is custom, and decent chunks of the CLI have been rewritten in rust.

https://github.com/facebookexperimental/eden

Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23124095

Facebook is still using mercurial last time I heard

Google and Facebook use mercurial over git internally.

Google doesn't use mercurial they use perforce.

Google uses a proprietary backend with the primary front end written to look like a clone of the perforce tool p4. The newer frontend that's getting investment is mercurial based. There also exists unofficial/deprecated support for a git frontend.

I believe Dropbox uses Mercurial as well.

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