Git's Killer Feature (why it's better than Mercurial) • Hacker News Board

Re: Git's Killer Feature (why it's better than Mercurial)

#11

Post by pius » Mon, Mar 10, 2008, 10:36 PM UTC

obdurak wrote: post #3

I see that Git has indeed advanced, sexier concepts than Hg. However there is one thing that makes me uncomfortable with Git: Its source code is a bit like the Linux kernel: written in C, messy, with lots of scripts (including Bash and Perl scripts). Mercurial's is written in Python. As an Ocaml hacker, I do not like Python much; however I think a tool such a VCS ought to be written in a higher-level language than C,…

You could always re-implement Git in OCaml, Haskell, or whatever other language you might like.

Re: Git's Killer Feature (why it's better than Mercurial)

#12

Post by mhartl » Tue, Mar 11, 2008, 2:01 AM UTC

obdurak wrote: post #3

I see that Git has indeed advanced, sexier concepts than Hg. However there is one thing that makes me uncomfortable with Git: Its source code is a bit like the Linux kernel: written in C, messy, with lots of scripts (including Bash and Perl scripts). Mercurial's is written in Python. As an Ocaml hacker, I do not like Python much; however I think a tool such a VCS ought to be written in a higher-level language than C,…

Linus has addressed this:

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643...

Re: Git's Killer Feature (why it's better than Mercurial)

#13

Post by obdurak » Wed, Mar 12, 2008, 8:01 PM UTC

mhartl wrote: post #12

obdurak wrote: post #3

I see that Git has indeed advanced, sexier concepts than Hg. However there is one thing that makes me uncomfortable with Git: Its source code is a bit like the Linux kernel: written in C, messy, with lots of scripts (including Bash and Perl scripts). Mercurial's is written in Python. As an Ocaml hacker, I do not like Python much; however I think a tool such a VCS ought to be written in a higher-level language than C,…

Linus has addressed this: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-control.git/57643...

Yes but it's a C++ vs C argument and I certainly wouldn't advocate C++ for anything. What would be more appropriate I think is a type-safe high-level language with garbage collection, where you can at least concatenate strings and forget about it for most of the code, save maybe the lower-levels in pure C.