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Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository

@Scale

454K subscribers • 2 videos on Hallway

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  • Recommended by 2 people: 2 on Hacker News.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2016 to 2022.
  • Presented by Rachel Potvin

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

316K views11 years ago2 recommendations

Software designTools and practiceSoftware architectureCode review and teamwork

Rachel Potvin explains the scale of Google's codebase, their custom monolithic source repository, and the tooling that makes this workflow feasible.

This talk will outline the scale of Google’s codebase, describe Google’s custom-built monolithic source repository, and discuss the reasons behind choosing this model of source control management. It will include background on the systems and workflows used at Google that make managing and working productively with a large repository feasible, in addition to a discussion of the advantages and trade-offs of this approach. Presenter: Rachel Potvin

Why it's here

2 people recommend this

What people say. Highly recommended as the definitive explanation of Google's monorepo architecture, its benefits, and its trade-offs.

twotwotwoon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Go Packaging Proposal Process”

…the latest rev of their source control tree, by company policy. You upgrade something for one, you upgrade it for the whole codebase. Sounds daunting, but they have lots of testing, canary servers, and so on to catch problems. There is a great talk about some of this by Rachel Potvin (can't recall if it covers the third_party/ stuff specifically): link to this video So Go's initial model didn't c…
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kyrraon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Trunk-Based Development”

Google doesn't use perforce anymore. They have a custom in-house SCM that has various interfaces wrapped around it. I'd recommend this video that describes it. link to this video
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kyrraon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Google is 2B lines of code and it's all in one place (2015)”

Googler opinions are my own. I also highly recommend this ACM article talking about our source control from 2016. link There's also a YouTube video which is linked from the wired article that is good. link to this video
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valarauca1on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository”

Google gave a talk at the @scale conference in 2015 about this very topic. You can watch it here (30 minutes): link to this video
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weinzierlon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Software Engineering at Google (2017)”

…bles us to work on that change together. I don't understand how they do this at google. As far as I understand in their model they either have to - give up on collaboration and always have just a single developer work on a change. - share code by other means. - check in unfinished work to the trunk for collaboration and constantly break trunk. 1 link to this video 2 link…
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svaton Hacker News • Mentions

On “Case Study: Monolithic Repository at Google (2018) [pdf]”

…ially like the “Threats to Validity” section that says what biases may have affected the results; more papers and arguments should have them IMO). Older reading on monorepos that I'm aware of: • Dan Luu, Advantages of monorepos (2015) link • Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2015): link (HTML) / link (PDF) / link to this video (video) This paper is from the “Software Engineering in Practice” track of the ICSE 2018 conference: • link…
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