# Sapling

15 Hacker News commenters recommended Sapling and 4 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 7 of 13 months. It meets the Hacker Approved badge rule.

**Verdict:** Meta's version control system, liked for its Mercurial-style workflow and scaling to huge repositories. Critics say the experience outside Meta is subpar and the open source version is less supported.

## Why people recommend it

- Mercurial-style workflow without named branches (3 comments): "companies like Meta have to train people who are used to git to use tools like sapling, which does not require named branches" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47769609)) "I loved using sapling / mercurial so much at work that I ended up using the sapling SCM vsc extension at home all the time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47760456)) "get the best of Mercurial's user experience niceness while collaborating via GitHub" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172688))
- Handles huge repos and large files (3 comments): "Centralized, virtual file system, all commits automatically on cloud, large binary files totally fine, Mercurial CLI." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50095457)) "Still Sapling + Eden to make local work on a sparse checkout viable." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173004)) "Git replacement that actually works at 10M+ file scale" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991548))
- Better than git in various ways (2 comments): "These are all version control systems that are better than git in various ways." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47714616)) "never looked back for any of my own projects" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849312))

## What people warn about

- Subpar experience outside Meta (2 comments): "the experience for non-Facebookers is subpar" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47761921)) "Literally nobody outside FB knows what they’re missing and until they fix that, literally nobody cares." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47762324))
- Open source version poorly supported (2 comments): "Not yet supported publicly, OSS is buildable for unsupported experimentation." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936196)) "the open source version doesn't seem to be supported or updated that much" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48368344))

## Alternatives hackers recommend

- [Git](https://hackerapproved.com/p/git.md): 814 recommend
- [Jujutsu (jj)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jujutsu.md): 335 recommend
- [Mercurial](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mercurial.md): 121 recommend
- [jj (Jujutsu)](https://hackerapproved.com/p/jj.md): 115 recommend
- [Fossil](https://hackerapproved.com/p/fossil.md): 106 recommend

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Sapling", https://hackerapproved.com/p/sapling/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).