How can they post this obviously internal thing from Google? How can they get clearance from security/IP?
A History of IDEs at Google
31–40 of 333 posts
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#32I am very opinionated, but I really don't like Cider V. I have been using neovim at Google since 2017 and it's been great.
same! how do you deal with cloudtop latency though? sometimes my neovim is very slow and laggy because of the remote connection / network file system
I use a workstation specifically to improve latency. Needed to get approval at some point to get a refresh though.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#33That most engineers use the same IDE at Google allows the company to collect a huge amount of telemetry about what features they are using, how often, and how much. Quite similar to the entire codebase being in a single repo, it allows a certain visibility into what is happening that just isn't possible other places. When Google wanted engineers to use AI features, it turned them on in Cider-V by default. And if you…
Visibility doesn't always get you value though. See the many companies that unify their ticketing to something like Jira, and end up running reports on in. The actual accuracy of the aggregates is rarely great, and instead leads to people doing "jira optimization" to make reports look good.
I once worked at a place where VPs were looking at sprint burndown charts, and asked what happened if the line didn't look a lot like the line expected by JIRA. The telemetry is therefore often a curse, as any metric becomes a target. How many companies today have KPIs about having automated code reviews, which are then ignored by the devs, because said reviews are just wrong on almost everything?
The learnings of Seeing Like A State don't apply just to governments.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#34I had to laugh we he said it took a dozen people a couple years. That's a terribly small investment relative to the leverage over developer productivity, and pales in comparison to what eBay, IBM et al spent in similar large but specialized developer populations for integrated tooling.
I'd like to hear the perspective of the developer/user; the IDE provider has some incentive to take credit and imply high utilization reflects success rather than Google policy.
I'm interested in how tooling conditions developer expectations more broadly. I'd love to see a comparison of Linux OS development (all local+open+git, open but contributor hierarchy) vs Google (monorepo+required tooling, pre-allocated authority) from someone who's done both.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#35The last year I’ve been doing all my dev on a vscode VM thingy my company set up. It’s just been getting better and better. It’s like local dev but, tbh, better. It’s at the point where I don’t even install dev tooling locally any more at all. My computer is just a thin client. The aspect I miss is the distributed compilation hinted at in the article. I remember back at the end of 1990s using distcc and things, but t…
You want bazel. Once you've internalized the bazel (blaze) system, you want all builds and tests to work that way.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#36The biggest question on my mind is how the use of Cider V is being affected by the officially ordained Antigravity.
Is the trendline starting to show that its adopting more Antigravity style tooling? or is this causing some sort of rift?
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
same! how do you deal with cloudtop latency though? sometimes my neovim is very slow and laggy because of the remote connection / network file system
I use a workstation specifically to improve latency. Needed to get approval at some point to get a refresh though.
like a workstation under your desk? is the latency bad when you remote access it not in the office?
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#38The most amazing thing to me about Cider-V was that Cider (without the V) actually went away after a relatively short amount of time, when virtually every other internal service that is officially EOL-ed lives on essentially forever.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#39Was there 2009-2014 and then again 2020-2026. I think there are a lot of aspects of IDE use and culture at Google that this post omits. My recollection from 2009-2011 is that emacs and vim were the dominant editors (just as the TV show Silicon Valley depicted), and there was a decent-sized minority using Eclipse and Intellij, both of which had official support for Google tooling. The command line still largely ruled…
How many new googlers use vim or emacs do you think? I can imagine at least a small amount of new vim people since vim will always be popular, but I would love to know if more than a handful of new googlers a year use emacs
I've switched to emacs and I no longer use IDEs. This is because I do all my edits, as a personal policy, via LLM. I mostly use emacs for magit (I work on a git-on-borg repo).
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#40There's more history than this. Disclaimer: Xoogler (2010-2017).
When I first started the environment you used depended entirely on language. In the C++ and Python space, there was the vim and emacs divide. With Java it was more complicated. Some still used vim/emacs but a lot of people used Eclipse.
Now Eclipse was a real problem at Google because of the source control system. Java IDEs are primarily built to import binaries, specifically jars. In the outside world, these dependencies are managed via Ant (very early days), Maven/Gradle or the like.
At Google there's a mono-repo (Perforce/Piper) and you check out parts of it locally and rely on the rest via a network connection (to SrcFS IIRC, it's been awhile). This was neat because you could edit a file locally and the dependencies would just recompile (via Blaze).
So for Eclipse a whole lot of initialization had to be done and the IDE would fall over. A lot. It had a team of ~10 working on it at one point. Then somebody did a 20% project called magicjar. Magicjar took a Perforce client and built all the dependencies as jars that could be imported directly without parsing the entire source tree (which was usually huge). This made it possible, even preferred, to use IntelliJ, which is what I did. Magicjar was great.
Other people actually made CLion work reasonably well with C++ too. That was nice. This was a much bigger undertaking with many more corner cases just given how C++ works (ie headers and templates).
So checking out a client was relatively heavyweight, even with a minimal local tree. And, if you worked on Google3, you had to do this a lot. You might need to do a config file change. This was the real starting point for Cider because it was way nicer to do config file changes with it.
Obviously I don't know where all this went from there. VS Studio as a Cider frontend? Ok, that was news to me. Engineers being unhappy when things change and when the slightest thing works differently is the least surprising thing I've ever heard.
Oh it's worth adding that in my time many people didn't use Perforce (P4) directly. They used somebody else's project, which was a Git frontend for it, called Git5. I believe it was already being deprecated while I was still there. But Git5 modelled a P4 change as a branch so you could play around with your Git commits locally and then squash them into a single P4 change. I actually liked this a lot.