[ihnorton]

Displacing git is certainly impossible in the short term, but that is not the only conceivable goal. Building a sustainable community does not require git levels of success. A few strategic adoptions can go a long way, as shown by Ocaml, Nix, and other similar projects who have small but passionate and vibrant communities. The key there is a core group of users who prioritize a certain set of values over the advantages (ecosystem size, polish, job opportunities perhaps) of technologies with a larger userbase.

There are also ways to displace git without immediately replacing it. Many projects adopted git only after using git-svn for an extended period, giving teams more time to develop git skills without completely disrupting existing workflows. It looks like a pijul-git bridge is planned, which could facilitate gradual adoption. Beyond patch ergonomics, there are many other areas where a concerted effort to provide a better solution than git could yield a highly attractive tool. One that comes to mind immediately is management of multi-repository codebases and dependencies; Pijul (or one of the other git competitors) could provide a better and more cohesive way to manage multi-repository code changes than is possible with git sub[tree,module,...], which would be an adoption magnet. Zig appears to be pursuing such a mixed adoption strategy: they are providing both a new language and a set of tools which support C and C++ and solve several huge pain points -- such as cross-compilaton -- without requiring direct Zig adoption. (the tools have the benefit that they make Zig projects with C or C++ dependencies much easier to bootstrap, which should also allow faster ecosystem growth).