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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

#221

Post by rcleveng »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #171
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…

If GCP was its own company it would almost be a Fortune 50 company on its own. Youtube would be a Fortune 100 company. That seems a lot more successful than most software companies. Meta on the other hand, really just has ads.

Totally.

GCP makes more revenue than Oracle, which is in the 96th spot. Also YouTube was 2x Paramount revenue in 2025.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#222

Post by rcleveng »

skybrian wrote: post #58

> a team dedicated to the IntelliJ integration was formed around 2015 I don't know which team that was, but to add to that, official support for IntelliJ at Google started quite a bit earlier. I was the second person to join a team writing IntelliJ plugins. We wrote a Blaze plugin not too long after Blaze launched, as it was becoming more popular. Google tells me that Blaze launched in 2006, so I think it must have b…

Nice to see you Brian!

Blaze was started late 2005 or early 2006. Eclipse+IntelliJ was also at that time.

The IntelliJ blaze plugin was already started and out when I joined in 2007. My first job was to keep it from being rewritten yet another time, get teams to use it, and also keep it from being cancelled.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#223

Post by rcleveng »

DannyBee wrote: post #101
jeffbee wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was there never a detour via Eclipse Theia? I thought it might have had some traction internally, since Cloud Shell is based on it.

Not on the developer side. The cloud side, yes, a bit.

still on the cloud side, cloud workstations and also the cloud shell gui mode are all theia.

I never understood theia TBH

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#224

Post by rcleveng »

hcnews wrote: post #163
randomCloud wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume quick change became critique?

There was a code reviewer starting with M before Critique iirc (Mondrian I wanna say?). The M code reviewer was completely written in Python iirc.

Yup, you guessed it.

I was the eng manager for that for a bit, added some APIs to use to do code reviews inside of Eclipse or IntelliJ. That idea never took on, but when when I showed it to the code search team in Munich, they loved it.

Critique was a fast follow.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#225

Post by rcleveng »

fleaflicker wrote: post #184

Another real killer feature of web-based IDEs is zero setup for new engineers. You won’t have to spend a day fiddling with your local env. Everything just works immediately. There are commercial alternatives like GH codespaces but not as good as Cider-V.

I'd rather have a remote hosted devcontainer and a local IDE. No fiddling, settings pushed on the container (same with plugins to use etc).

The keybindings with the web ide's always are a drag to me, actually the lack of good keybindings.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#226

Post by internet101010 »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #215
materielle wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One important piece of context that might make all these stories less confusing for non-googlers: Code references are less important inside Google editors, because we have a code viewer tool inside the web browser. Most people read, explore, follow references, and share permalinks to the view-only tool. It’s a lot better than viewing code in GitHub. It’s super fast, is connected to language servers and can actually t…

This...I noticed a real productivity increase when going from Cider/VSCode to JetBrains/IDEA/IntelliJ for Kotlin code editing. Having a "real" IDE was still a plus, if just for the better code completion. AI has mostly changed the way I write code, I guess, so I rarely use JetBrains anymore, but a few years ago it was clearly a win to use a real IDE at least for Kotlin programming.

JetBrains has several niches it excels in. DataGrip is by far the most important tool in my toolbox, as it allows me to work with every database type imaginable in one place (Databricks, Postgres, MSSQL, Oracle, etc.).

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#227

Post by maximinus_thrax »

mcoliver wrote: post #57

Meanwhile Google acquired windsurf, released antigravity, and recently handicapped it for Google business workspace users by removing the AI Ultra plan for workspace. So the only real way to use antigravity is either being a Google employee or using a personal account and AI Ultra. https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gemini/ai-ultra...

> https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/gemini/ai-ultra...

It's been a while since I visited any google pages and I'm shocked how insipid and soulless their UX still is.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#228

Post by Analemma_ »

barrkel wrote: post #35
wood_spirit wrote: post #14

The 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.

Maybe, but I feel like an article I’ve read many, many times is “we hired one or more Xooglers for our startup and this turned out to be a catastrophe because they insisted on trying to bring blaze/bazel with them and it nearly destroyed the company.” It’s always bazel specifically in these articles, never any of the other internal Google stuff like Spanner.

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#229

Post by rokob »

achille wrote: post #181
malkia wrote: post #179

Xoogler here (2014-2017). My team (part of Ads) used primarily Java, and we used the Eclipse, then we started switching the IntelliJ. Cider was used also a lot, but I've heard even back then some folks were free to use whatever they like - vi, emacs, you name it.

Yep, I made my own! (Xoogler 2017-2023) this is my noogler IDE story, one of my favorite, proudest hacks! I developed a fork of the IntelliJ IDE on my second week at google out of raw frustration over latency. At the time I was commuting 2-3hrs/day SF MTV on the gBus. Connectivity on the bus wasn't optimal, and there was high latency. Cider didn't have deep integration, and wasn't able to let me explore and understan…

Dude I was there 2019-2022 and mdproxy was a huge win when I realized I could work while traveling. I remember following some incantations on someone’s personal page to get it running. Then covid happened and I was ahead of everyone for a few weeks because I already had been doing real work on my laptop. Thanks!

Re: A History of IDEs at Google

#230

Post by aix1 »

mcoliver wrote: post #220
barbolo wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a sad surprise last week when we tried to upgrade the workspace AI plan for some of our team members to Ultra and it was gone. We're moving to Claude/Codex.

Yeah I've considered that as well. Was loving having everything in the same ecosystem and have been pleased with the Gemini 3.1 models. I still think this is a blip and Google will come around. It doesn't make any sense.

You're not missing much -- Claude is a better model for coding. That's what basically everyone at Google DeepMind uses and what I expect most other Googlers would choose to use IF they had access:

https://www.businessinsider.com/google-deepmind-ai-tool-divi...

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