Explore the journey of Facebook's transition from Git to Mercurial, uncovering the technical and social dynamics that influenced one of the tech industry's pivotal decisions in source control management. This post delves into the reasons behind Facebook's shift, the challenges of scaling Git, and the pivotal role of community and collaboration in adopting Mercurial

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Facebook chose to use Mercurial instead of Git due to performance issues and the willingness of the Mercurial community to collaborate. They considered alternatives such as Perforce and Bitkeeper but ultimately found Mercurial to have cleaner architecture. Facebook successfully migrated their engineering organization to Mercurial.

Why Facebook doesn’t use Git

The irony is that several open source projects maintained by Meta still needs to be distributed over git. Sounds like double effort to me.

<blockquote>
because performance
</blockquote>
Yet Windows is source controlled in git… And yeah, they had performance issues, but managed to solve them. 🤨

It’s hard for me to appreciate such advice from a company that choose to invest in writing compiler for PHP instead switching to something more elaborate and fast

FIrst of all why do Google and Facebook opt for ridiculous, gigantic 17 million LoC monorepos?
I’m happy Git doesn’t make changes that would impact all of us just because of Facebook’s very peculiar and abnormal design decisions, they honestly should just make their own source-control the way Google did to cope with their unique design decisions.