[adjejmxbdjdn]

If you think about how much investment has gone into Git, whereas Mercurial has really been developed by a skeleton team, even the fact that they’re similar is indicative that Mercurial may have been better at its core.

I haven’t touched mercurial in like 15 years, and from what I remember its UX was superior to what Git provides today. It had an extension system which I don’t remember the full capabilities of so I don’t know if Git has even now matched up to that.

[GuB-42]

Git doesn't have an extension system because it works differently from Mercurial in that regard.

Mercurial is more monolithic, and is based on python, writing an extension means writing a bit of python and telling Mercurial to integrate it.

Git is more like a loosely connected collection of commands working on the filesystem. It means that extending git is just creating an executable with a particular name in a particular directory. The executable can in turn call other commands, in particular the low level "plumbing", or even work directly with the files in .git.

They way they are similar is that they follow the same model: a decentralized system based on a DAG. And speaking of a "skeleton team", git was famously Linus Torvalds 2-week side project, and even though so much development has happened, providing tooling, convenience, performance, portability, etc... at its core, it never changed.