[ecuzzillo]

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.

[snapetom]

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.

[wizofaus]

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.