Re: Deciding between Git/Mercurial

[Felipe Contreras <felipe.contreras@gmail.com>]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 1:08 PM, Johannes Schindelin
<Johannes.Schindelin@gmx.de> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I tried to refrain from commenting in this thread, because I do not want
> to encourage people just to use msysGit and never even attempt to fix
> their own issues.
>
> But I cannot let this go uncommented:
>
> On Mon, 28 Sep 2009, Felipe Contreras wrote:
>
>> IMO the key difference between hg and git is the storage model: hg
>> stores deltas, while git stores snapshots. That would mean that certain
>> operations are theoretically faster in git (e.g. checkout, diff) while
>> others faster in hg, although with git's packed format I guess there's
>> no operation faster in hg. This means that it doesn't matter how much
>> hg's python code improves, or if they even re-write parts in C, they
>> will never be able to match git's performance (unless they change the
>> storage model, which essentially means changing the whole design --
>> won't happen).
>
> That is wrong.  "git log -- <file>" will always be slightly faster in
> Mercurial, for all the reasons you mentioned.

Ok, thanks for pointing that out. I was thinking that maybe 'git
blame' would also be slightly faster on hg, but I really don't know.
Anyway, I think for most operations git would always be faster, and
more importantly; some essential operations will be faster (checkout,
diff <committish>).

-- 
Felipe Contreras