Scaling Mercurial at Facebook
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment order"We could have spent a lot of time making it more modular in a way that would be friendly to a source control tool, but there are a number of benefits to using a single repository. Even at our current scale, we often make large changes throughout our code base, and having a single repository is useful for continuous modernization. Splitting it up would make large, atomic refactorings more difficult. On top of that, the idea that the scaling constraints…
Our code base has grown organically and its internal dependencies are very complex. So instead of cleaning up the internal dependencies, they decided to rewrite Mercurial. That is the kind of thing Facebook likes to do: for example, when PHP got too slow, they wrote a PHP compiler....
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 525
- Total comments
- 313
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-01-07 | Scaling Mercurial at FacebookFirst breakout · Best thread | jordigh | 360 | 241 |
| 2016-04-28 | Scaling Mercurial at Facebook(2014) | dineshp2 | 1 | 0 |
| 2016-05-27 | Scaling Mercurial at FacebookLatest 20+ point return | chairmanwow | 164 | 72 |