it's wild just doing git init instead of manually setting up /truck, /tags, and /branch every time.
this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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I believe his goto comment on git is that its current maintainer did/does far more work on git them him.
Thank god for that dude.
Handing over maintainership was not a hard choice. It was very much: "The moment somebody else comes along that I can trust to keep it going, I'll go back to doing just the kernel."
Priorities
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In a cave with a box of scrap
The biggest tragedy of modern media is that they chose to cast Elon Musk as the real life Tony Stark instead of torvalds who created 2 pieces of truly revolutionary software (with the help of thousands of other engineers ofc)
Four things went for Musk:
- he was rich
- he had a passing resemblance to Robert Downey Jr.
- he ~~made~~ was closely associated with futuristic hardware (we don't seem to value revolutionary software the same way as hardware)
- he was rich
In all honesty, a lot of solo developers who are directly responsible for the internet as we know it should be getting far more credit than rich ass holes but here we are.
Edit: correct
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Also Subsurface, a scuba diving log program, but that one is not quite as well known.
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It could've been mercurial, but I'm glad that didn't happen. Being shouted at in a mailing-list for fixing a bug doesn't sound like fun. Also, the amount of CPU resources that would be wasted running a VCS in python would be phenomenal. And have fun trying to develop a project using a separate python version than supported by your python VCS.
Being shouted at in a mailing-list for fixing a bug doesn’t sound like fun.
What's that a reference to?
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If Mercurial were as popular as Git I would presume that it would be rewritten in C or Rust, but who can say.
I'm sure it could, but no one thinks it's worth their time when Git is right there and does the same job.
Care to explain your comment for a layman?
From my limited experience mercurial is way more intuitive than git. The big one is named branches are a thing instead of an abstraction.
Python 10s of multiples more CPU cycles than git. It is an interpreted language: every instruction is read by another process, checked, and then run. Hit on the other hand is executed straight by the CPU. It has at least one layer of indirection less than python (the python interpreter may have multiple). That means it can be slower but it definitely uses more energy.
Since git is so popular, if it were instead mercurial, the energy requirements would be much higher for version control. Whether that will be noticeable on a bill is debatable. I haven't run the numbers.
Regarding the different python versions. As mentioned before, there is a python interpreter. That interpreter is versioned and so is the python language. Many things are backwards compatible meaning something written in a higher version of the python language can be interpreted by a lower version of the python interpreter. The reverse is also true, so python interpreter with a higher version can interpret a python file using a lower version of the language.
Notice that I put "can" in bold. That's because newer versions can deprecate certain features or parts of the language. So, if you're writing a project in a different version of python, mercurial may or may not run depending on your version. Resolving that may not be as intuitive as one thinks.
I think those were he points you were referring to when you asked your question?
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Mercurial is written in Python, Git in C.
Given the number of git instances, had it been implemented in Python, more CPU cycles / electricity would have been used.
Blah blah Mercurial is responsible for global warming. (I’m being sarcastic by the way - I love Mercurial).
What do you mean by "are a thing?" Git has branches.
Git branches are very different to Mercurial branches. In git they're similar to tags that move along with the head commit of that particular branch. In Mercurial every commit contains meta data indicating the branch it's on. It also has a query language that lets you do sone quite neat things with selecting groups of commits based on their metadata, which can be useful in code reviews and similar.
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I think it's less user experience and more that mercurial is a lot more demanding hardware wise to do the same rough job?
Turned out better than javascript.
I expected someone to say that, and boom first comment lol
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