Mercurial actually has lightweight branches like Git; they're just anonymous, as in Monotone, not named like Git. There's an extension for Mercurial, called bookmarks, that allows you to name your anonymous heads, giving you Git-equivalent functionality.
You're correct that Mercurial's (IMHO badly-named "branch" command) is much heavier-weight than Git branching. I consider them closer to changeset labels than branches.
bzr has the bzr-colo plugin to support co-located branches. Like I said in another comment, I think bzr, git and hg are comparable and there isn't a clear winner (and there need not be).
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Mercurial actually has lightweight branches like Git; they're just anonymous, as in Monotone, not named like Git. There's an extension for Mercurial, called bookmarks, that allows you to name your anonymous heads, giving you Git-equivalent functionality.
You're correct that Mercurial's (IMHO badly-named "branch" command) is much heavier-weight than Git branching. I consider them closer to changeset labels than branches.
bzr has the bzr-colo plugin to support co-located branches. Like I said in another comment, I think bzr, git and hg are comparable and there isn't a clear winner (and there need not be).
https://launchpad.net/bzr-colo