Centralized, virtual file system, all commits automatically on cloud, large binary files totally fine, Mercurial CLI. It’s fantastic. People who only use Git really don’t understand how much better things can be.
(Like GH finally has some support for stacks, 15 years late, with an implementation which is somehow more complicated and less powerful than the prior art...)
I agree so hard. It’s inertia is too strong and we’ve stalled progress for a decade.
Most people aren't VCS nerds, most are of a generation that only ever knew git. Learning git was a prerequisite they engaged with out of necessity, not by choice, not after exploring the problem space and pondering about different approaches. Learning git was difficult, and the more they learned the more they discovered they had more to learn, including the little things, obscure details and a plethora of paper-cuts. For them (again, I suspect they are a majority), the perspective of learning something else comes with the expectation of a similar daunting effort and steep cognitive reluctance.
That's the paradox of git as I see it: had it been a simple and easy system to pick-up, it would probably have been replaced, and/or the VCS space would be much more competitive.
You just blew my mind with this. This is shockingly profound.
(Okay not literally exactly, for example, jj/git not hg. But the vibe is the same.)
There's not really a VCS meetup in NYC, but I got to hear David and others at Rust NYC wax eloquent about Sapling vs Piper and Buck vs Bazel a couple of times, so I think the audience is there!
Maybe, we'll see. I think one thing that's tricky these days with startups is that being super transparent technically about what you're up to is much harder to justify. Look what happened with Origin: tobi vibed up a copy over the weekend after it was announced. Obviously there's balance to be found here, but that's partially why we play our cards a little closer to our chest.
Let me share with you my previous screeds on this topic:
* https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/dependencies-belong-in-... * https://www.forrestthewoods.com/blog/using-zig-to-commit-too...
They’re semi-adjacent in that they are about build systems that don’t suck. (buck2 is also mostly TheWay but also not usable outside of Meta and has room for improvement).
Save us from Git and CMake Steve! Please I beg you!!
I do care about Windows, having used it for years at this point. The client is git or jj, so Windows support is there for sure. For some of the other stuff we’re doing, we’ll see what customer demand is like. Obviously there are tons of devs on Windows, but we also have to make calls about priorities too.