Sapling
Hacker ApprovedShares rank 12 of 26 version control systems by recommenders
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.
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.
19 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 15
- criticize it
- 4
- approval share
- 79%
Recommended in 7 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it carries the badge
- 15 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, met.
- 3.8 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 7 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Mercurial-style workflow without named branches
“companies like Meta have to train people who are used to git to use tools like sapling, which does not require named branches”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “What is jj and why should I care?” “I loved using sapling / mercurial so much at work that I ended up using the sapling SCM vsc extension at home all the time”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “GitHub Stacked PRs” “get the best of Mercurial's user experience niceness while collaborating via GitHub”
Comment from 17 May 2026 in “Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]” Handles huge repos and large files
“Centralized, virtual file system, all commits automatically on cloud, large binary files totally fine, Mercurial CLI.”
Comment from 14 Oct 2026 in “Anthropic's Scion is heavily inspired by Mononoke” “Still Sapling + Eden to make local work on a sparse checkout viable.”
Comment from 17 May 2026 in “Mercurial, 20 years and counting: how are we still alive and kicking? [video]” “Git replacement that actually works at 10M+ file scale”
Comment from 20 Nov 2025 in “Meta Segment Anything Model 3” Better than git in various ways
“These are all version control systems that are better than git in various ways.”
Comment from 10 Apr 2026 in “We've raised $17M to build what comes after Git” “never looked back for any of my own projects”
Comment from 21 Apr 2026 in “Jujutsu Megamerges for Fun and Profit”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Subpar experience outside Meta
“the experience for non-Facebookers is subpar”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “GitHub Stacked PRs” “Literally nobody outside FB knows what they’re missing and until they fix that, literally nobody cares.”
Comment from 14 Apr 2026 in “GitHub Stacked PRs” Open source version poorly supported
“Not yet supported publicly, OSS is buildable for unsupported experimentation.”
Comment from 28 Apr 2026 in “Ted Nyman – High Performance Git” “the open source version doesn't seem to be supported or updated that much”
Comment from 2 Jun 2026 in “Jellycat: a Rust CLI for Turning Jujutsu Changesets into GitHub PR Stacks”
Other version control systems people recommend
The four most recommended other version control systems, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Git | 814 | 503 | 62% | 13 | 15 yrs42 owners | — |
| Jujutsu (jj) | 335 | 106 | 76% | 13 | 1 yr21 owners | Approved |
| Mercurial | 121 | 43 | 74% | 12 | 19 yrs7 owners | Approved |
| jj (Jujutsu) | 115 | 37 | 76% | 12 | 1 yr7 owners | Approved |
| SaplingThis page | 15 | 4 | 79% | 7 | — | Approved |
What people said
20 of the 21 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“We credited Sapling because that's how Meta itself externally refers to the entire system”
“why not use Sapling/Mononoke or extend it and contribute back to the open source community?”
“Centralized, virtual file system, all commits automatically on cloud, large binary files totally fine, Mercurial CLI.”
“proprietary solutions like piper/jujutsu and sapling”
“hg and jj and sapling can all already achieve this”
“Meta: Sapling on EdenFS (from what I read, never worked there)”
“the open source version doesn't seem to be supported or updated that much”
“Still Sapling + Eden to make local work on a sparse checkout viable.”
“get the best of Mercurial's user experience niceness while collaborating via GitHub”
“Not yet supported publicly, OSS is buildable for unsupported experimentation.”
“never looked back for any of my own projects”
“companies like Meta have to train people who are used to git to use tools like sapling, which does not require named branches”
“Literally nobody outside FB knows what they’re missing and until they fix that, literally nobody cares.”
“the experience for non-Facebookers is subpar”
“I loved using sapling / mercurial so much at work that I ended up using the sapling SCM vsc extension at home all the time”
“Sapling and Phabricator much much better (when supported by a massive internal team)”
“These are all version control systems that are better than git in various ways.”
“path-based delta dictionary compression does much better”
“The others would miss obviously AI generated content”
“Git replacement that actually works at 10M+ file scale”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.