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Comment by wizofaus | Hacker News Reader

I still don't understand how git won the source control battle so decisively. I respect git for what it's good at and its power, but from what I've observed it's far from clearly being the obvious choice of source control for closed source software shops. JIRA I can take or leave, it does the job - it's hard to imagine anyone being driven to hate it, but I can believe having it badly configured would be a serious drain on productivity.

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I can only speak to the comparison with hg, but for large repos, git's performance is literally 10x better in our case (we have two parallel copies, one in hg and one in git, so as to smooth the transition to git). hg seems more usable, but certain decisions are poor (e.g. baking the branch name into each commit); overall I have no strong preference between the two except for the speed.

But the speed pretty much drowns out any other signal.

git's performance increase came around at the right time, too. Code bases were becoming bigger and bigger, and Agile's popularity preached a lot of branching. SVN branches were a full copy, making things way worse.

Yeah that had occurred to me. But I'd used TFS (which didn't have light-weight branches) with Agile-like development practices and it wasn't that big a deal. Maybe if the codebase was 10 or 20 times bigger it would've been.

Migration was easy, it was decentralised, had a famous original author & a huge famous project using it and had a lot of "hip" source code platforms such as github, gitorious, bitbucket (pre-atlassian) and gitlab.

I'm not surprised it won tbh.

Game companies are still using Perforce though.

> Game companies are still using Perforce though.

Maybe the ratio of text to non-text assets?

That, and repo size can get huge in a game project and no one wants to have to copy the whole thing to do a check out. Svn still sees use for gamedevs that don't want to buy.

> I respect git for what it's good at and its power, but from what I've observed it's far from clearly being the obvious choice of source control for closed source software shops.

At this point git is the incumbent, which is self-sustaining: developers already know git, so you'd need a really compelling reason to use anything else and take on the burden of training your developers to use it.

It helps that git is freely available and is by far the top choice for Free and Open Source projects.

Of course, SVN used to be in the same position, but git is such a great improvement that it was able to win out. I imagine git's origins in Linux kernel development may also have been a factor in its early success.

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