Please see this figure: http://www.aosabook.org/en/mercurial.html#fig.hg.revlog http://www.aosabook.org/en/mercurial.html#fig.hg.revlog I hope you see the simi

Please see this figure: http://www.aosabook.org/en/mercurial.html#fig.hg.revlog http://www.aosabook.org/en/mercurial.html#fig.hg.revlog I hope you see the similarities between the storage layers of Mercurial and of Git: Mercurial has a changeset graph with pointers into a manifest graph. The nodes in the manifest graph points to the files presents in that commit. It's (also) not very complicated. As for branches, they're very simple too, as I tried to explain here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6753477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6753477