Many years ago there was an open lecture or rather Q&A in my university by one of Facebook engineers.

He mentioned that they do not use Git, to which I was surprised and asked why. He didn’t provide a concrete answer, since it was like this when he joined.

However, this article may have an answer to why Facebook uses Mercurial instead of Git. “May” because obviously there’s just one viewpoint.

Tl;dr: because they had a unique use case as well as unique amounts of money to contribute to a custom solution. Still, it’s interesting that their initial proposal to contribute to Git was sorta declined.

So, here we are. Does it mean that you also need to switch to Mercurial to be like Facebook? No! Very likely you’re not Facebook. Moreover, I only used 1 project stored in Mercurial in my life (I’m not trying to argue that there are more).

Still, I like such articles on the topic of “tech history”. I think they help us to better understand why we are where we are and how did we get here.

#git #hg #facebook #history