What is the Difference Between Mercurial and Git?

Question

I've been using git for some time now on Windows (with msysGit) and I like the idea of distributed source control. Just recently I've been looking at Mercurial (hg) and it looks interesting. However, I can't wrap my head around the differences between hg and git.

Has anyone made a side-by-side comparison between git and hg? I'm interested to know what differs hg and git without having to jump into a fanboy discussion.

Answer 1

There's one huge difference between git and mercurial; the way the represent each commit. git represents commits as snapshots, while mercurial represents them as diffs.

What does this means in practice? Well, many operations are faster in git, such as switching to another commit, comparing commits, etc. Specially if these commits are far away.

AFAIK there's no advantage of mercurial's approach.