[tikhonj]

Another alternative is the patch-theory approach from Darcs and now Pijul. It's a fundamentally different way of thinking about version control—I haven't actually used it myself but, from reading about it, I find thinking in patches matches my natural intuition better than git's model. Darcs had some engineering limitations that could lead to really bad performance in certain cases, but I understand Pijul fixes that.

[gugagore]

I was a bit confused about the key point of patch-based versus snapshot-based, but I got some clarity in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39453146

[WorldMaker]

The Patch Theory of darcs and CRDTs (and the middle idea of OTs [Operational Transforms]) are all interestingly related in their early research and early cross-communication. It certainly is fascinating that today it is probably easier to ask "Do you ever think you might want a CRDT for source control?" to explain some of why you might want patch-based over snapshot-based, because CRDTs exist in part because it somewhat was started as "what if you could do something like darcs but with general data, not just source control?" It's fascinating which technologies win and in which ways/places/niches.