Mercurial can be augmented with Rust extensions for speeding up certain operations.
Though the Rust extensions are only tested by the project under Linux, users of MacOS, FreeBSD and other UNIX-likes have been using the Rust extensions. Your mileage may vary, but by all means do give us feedback or signal your interest for better support.
No Rust extensions are available for Windows at this time.
The following operations are sped up when using Rust:
More features are in the works, and improvements on the above listed are still in progress. For more experimental work see the "rhg" section.
You may already have the Rust extensions depending on how you install Mercurial:
$ hg debuginstall | grep -i rust checking Rust extensions (installed) checking module policy (rust+c-allow)
If those lines don't even exist, you're using an old version of 'hg' which does not have any Rust extensions yet.
You will need 'cargo' to be in your '$PATH'. See the "MSRV" section for which version to use.
Users of 'pip' can install the Rust extensions with the following command:
$ pip install mercurial --global-option --rust --no-use-pep517
'--no-use-pep517' is here to tell 'pip' to preserve backwards compatibility with the legacy 'setup.py' system. Mercurial has not yet migrated its complex setup to the new system, so we still need this to add compiled extensions.
This might take a couple of minutes because you're compiling everything.
See the "Checking for Rust" section to see if the install succeeded.
Some distributions are shipping Mercurial with Rust extensions enabled and pre-compiled (meaning you won't have to install 'cargo'), or allow you to specify an install flag. Check with your specific distribution for how to do that, or ask their team to add support for hg+Rust!
Please refer to the 'rust/README.rst' file in the Mercurial repository for instructions on how to install from source.
The minimum supported Rust version is defined in 'rust/clippy.toml'. The project's policy is to keep it at or below the version from Debian testing, to make the distributions' job easier.
There exists an experimental pure-Rust version of Mercurial called 'rhg' with a fallback mechanism for unsupported invocations. It allows for much faster execution of certain commands while adding no discernable overhead for the rest.
The only way of trying it out is by building it from source. Please refer to 'rust/README.rst' in the Mercurial repository.
See 'hg help config.rhg' for configuration options.
If you would like to help the Rust endeavor, please refer to 'rust/README.rst' in the Mercurial repository.