3 ms·
I like to think of Darcs as the PostgreSQL of distributed version control. They both have correctness as their first priority, sacrificing a little performance
by sirclueless 14y ago
I like to think of Darcs as the PostgreSQL of distributed version control. They both have correctness as their first priority, sacrificing a little performance as necessary. PostgreSQL was very slow at first but it is closing that gap, and I think the end result is better for it. Git and Mercurial sacrifice correctness in favor of pragmatism in some cases, by taking shortcuts such as three-way merges.
Unlike in the relational database world, there is no accepted standard for interfacing with a versioned repository. It remains to be seen whether Darcs, like PostgreSQL, will eventually gather enough steam to build a substantial user base.
- tonfa 14y agoI always thought the correctness aspect of Darcs was very weak, from what I remember most of the original "patch theory" wasn't sound
- sanxiyn 14y agoYes, the original theory was weak and not sound, but they worked on it. There is some initial work towards Coq formalization. http://wiki.darcs.net/Theory http://wiki.darcs.net/Theory
- papsosouid 14y agoThe problem with that analogy is that you are comparing darcs to a myth. Postgresql was not "very slow at first". It has certainly gotten faster, but it was faster than mysql for real workloads ~15 years ago. It isn't closing a gap, it is pulling further and further ahead. Mysql is only fast if you are using myisam tables and doing a single threaded microbenchmark of repeating a single simple query in a loop. On real benchmarks where there's many connections executing many different queries at the same time, postgresql has always been way ahead of mysql.