Mercurial
More info
- Creator
- Matt Mackall
- Released
- 2005
- Type
- Version control system
- License
- GPL-2.0
Started the same month as Git, for the same reason, and was widely considered nicer to use — and lost anyway.
When BitKeeper withdrew its free licence for the Linux kernel in April 2005, two projects began immediately. Linus Torvalds wrote Git; Matt Mackall wrote Mercurial. Both are distributed, both are fast on large repositories. Mercurial was written in Python, had a more consistent command naming scheme, and treated history as immutable unless you explicitly asked otherwise.
Mozilla, Facebook and Nginx ran it at scale. That Git won anyway is usually attributed to GitHub rather than to the technology: the network effect of a dominant hosting ecosystem made the choice for most people. Facebook's work on very large repositories lived on in the Sapling tool.