I think it's a tall order for another SCM to challenge git. I can't imagine how it could be any more entrenched in the industry.

Further, I'm happy with git. I played with Mercurial years ago, long enough to work with it day-to-day, and just didn't find any relevant advantages versus git.

I love that people are still out there trying to improve things, and certainly don't want that to stop, but it's difficult for me to imagine switching at this point.

m12k

I'm also happy with git, but there's 3 main things that could improve on git IMO:

1) Better handling of large files than git-lfs. As in 10+ GB repos. This is needed for game development (currently they tend to use Perforce or PlasticSCM)

2) Sparse checkout via file system integration (like Eden has)

3) Build system integration, so unchanged files and modules don't even need to be fetched to be compiled, because cached builds can be fetched from a build server instead (requires proper modularization, so e.g. C++ macro expansion doesn't just prevent anything from being cacheable)

These are all features that primarily have value for repos that push the limits on size, like big monorepos (with a huge amount of files) or game development (with big asset files). But get it right, and you could massively cut down the time it takes to check out a branch and build it.

kvnhn

This is by no means a perfect match for your requirements, but I'll share a CLI tool I built, called Dud[0]. At the least it may spur some ideas.

Dud is meant to be a companion to SCM (e.g. Git) for large files. I was turned off of Git LFS after a couple failed attempts at using it for data science work. DVC[1] is an improvement in many ways, but it has some rough edges and serious performance issues[2].

With Dud I focused on speed and simplicity. To your three points above:

1) Dud can comfortably track datasets in the 100s of GBs. In practice, the bottleneck is your disk I/O speed.

2) Dud checks out binaries as links by default, so it's super fast to switch between commits.

3) Dud includes a means to build data pipelines -- think Makefiles with less footguns. Dud can detect when outputs are up to date and skip executing a pipeline stage.

I hope this helps, and I'd be happy to chat about it.

[0]: https://github.com/kevin-hanselman/dud

[1]: https://dvc.org

[2]: https://github.com/kevin-hanselman/dud#concrete-differences-...