revlog: efficient implementation of 'descendant' Iterating over descendants is costly, because there are no "parent -> children" pointers. Walking the other way around is much more efficient, especially on large repositories, where descendant walks can cost seconds. And the other hand, common ancestors code follows links in the right direction and has a compiled implementation. In real life usage, this saved up to 80s during some pull operations, where descendant test happens in extension code.