Subject: Re: Mercurial 0.4b vs git patchbomb benchmark

From: Matt Mackall <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 29 Apr 2005 00:40:43 -0700

On Fri, Apr 29, 2005 at 02:40:31AM -0400, Sean wrote:
> > - no way to do efficient delta storage
> 
> This has been discussed.  It is a recognized and accepted design
> trade-off.  Disk is cheap.

This trade-off FAILS, as my benchmarks against Mercurial have shown.
It trades 10x disk space for maybe 10% performance relative to my
approach. Meanwhile, it makes a bunch of other things hard, namely the
ones I've listed. Yes, you can hack around them, but the back end will
still be bloated.

> Your concearns are about performance rather than real limitations and it's
> just too damn early in the development process for that.  Frankly it's
> amazing how good git is considering its age; it's already _way_ faster and
> easier to use than bk ever was for my use.

Mercurial is even younger (Linus had a few days' head start, not to
mention a bunch of help), and it is already as fast as git, relatively
easy to use, much simpler, and much more space and bandwidth
efficient.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.