What is Perforce?
Perforce is a proprietary version control system developed by Perforce Software. It is popular among large enterprises, especially game studios, manufacturers, and semiconductor companies, to manage their digital assets and source code.
Some key features of Perforce include:
- Excellent scaling for extremely large codebases with millions of files and revisions
- Advanced branching and merging capabilities
- Integrated review system for code changes
- Fine-grained permissions to control team access
- Works well across globally distributed teams and offices
Unlike Git which is decentralized, Perforce uses a centralized client-server architecture. All versioned files and metadata is stored on the server, while developers use the Perforce client to connect and sync files to their local machines. This model facilitates collaboration across large teams.
Overall, Perforce stands out for version control scenarios involving huge repositories with very frequent changes - its performance and ability to scale remains unmatched. The learning curve may be higher than Git, but for specific large-scale use cases Perforce delivers exceptional power and flexibility.
Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, Mercurial SCM, ZenTao, Apache Subversion, Fossil, Plastic SCM, Veracity, Git for Windows, darcs, Rational ClearCase, MKS Source, SpectrumSCM, SourceAnywhere, SnapshotCM, Pijul are some alternatives to Perforce.