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A History of IDEs at Google

laurent.le-brun.eu

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Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#21

Post by StilesCrisis »

compiler-guy wrote: post #6
kylecazar wrote: post #4

I was surprised to read that Chromebook use at Google was common for engineers. Even if developing remotely I had assumed they'd opt for the most powerful machine possible.

Very little development in Google3 happens locally. You aren't even allowed to keep the source code on your local disk, and this is true no matter what OS it runs. (Android and Chromium are different though.) You have access to an extremely powerful remote workstation that from a UI perspective functions almost identically to a local workstation, via Chrome Remote Desktop. Plus, no one builds things locally, even on…

Could you even put all of google3 on local disk if it were allowed?!? You'd need quite a RAID array. I suspect it'd be almost impossible in practice.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#22

Post by jason1cho »

Initially Cider was branded as a light client that opened much faster than traditional IDEs.

Now, ironically with so many extensions and LLM computing, users seem to forget that they chose Cider because of its lightweight.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#25

Post by taeric »

compiler-guy wrote: post #17
taeric wrote: post #12

The advantages of a single platform are as obvious as the disadvantages. In that they are often whatever you want to frame them as for a narrative. I do think Google will continue to get results out of their tooling, as long as they are investing in the tooling. But that is not zero cost. Is it worth it for what they are doing? Largely seems to be. But it isn't like they are that much more successful at software proj…

Google is an ads company with a large amount of infrastructure to back it up. Sure, the money is mostly in ads, but serving searches, AI, youtube, and all the rest at the scale Google does it requires a technical tour-de-force. Does Google do it better than everyone? Absolutely not. But it does it better than many. Certainly it isn't the _only_ way to do it--other companies also manage to do it. But not all that many…

Most of what they do really really well, though, is accomplished by massive amounts of spending. That isn't a knock on it.

Consider that they spend more on trying to build up and support this central IDE than most companies dream of losing in productivity to not having this.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#26

Post by mghackerlady »

StilesCrisis wrote: post #20
kylecazar wrote: post #4

I was surprised to read that Chromebook use at Google was common for engineers. Even if developing remotely I had assumed they'd opt for the most powerful machine possible.

When I joined, I started with a MacBook and lost it within three months :( Afterwards I was issued a 12" Pixelbook and it was surprisingly much more usable than I had expected! I could ssh into a Linux box for running builds and tests. Cider worked perfectly. It was snappy enough to serve as a thin client even on a 4K screen.

Chromebooks are pretty much only good as thin clients, so much so that when I have the money I plan on building a powerful rackmount workstation and connecting to it via chromebook/box

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#27

Post by mghackerlady »

nostrademons wrote: post #16

Was 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

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#28

Post by genxy »

jason1cho wrote: post #22

Initially Cider was branded as a light client that opened much faster than traditional IDEs. Now, ironically with so many extensions and LLM computing, users seem to forget that they chose Cider because of its lightweight.

Everything turns into the thing it was set out to replace.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#29

Post by semiinfinitely »

j2kun wrote: post #18

I 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
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