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Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place

wired.com

301–310 of 347 posts

Re: Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. It isn't that it works well but merely that it is there. In fact the majority of Windows networks both corporate and small business I can safely say that it barely works and is usually a mismanaged unpatched mess or filled with crapware. Occasionally there's a nice tight network (our operations guys run a tight ship which is cool) but the general case is a pit of incompetence. The mantra among the consult…

In fact the majority of Windows networks both corporate and small business I can safely say that it barely works and is usually a mismanaged unpatched mess or filled with crapware. And yet, no vendor can hold a candle to Active Directory, which is the single best thing about running Windows in an enterprise. You literally cannot manage SSO, patching, and config management on a non-Windows environment for more than a…

You're 100% right. Sort of. I've built many an AD forest in my years and it is certainly powerful. However when your laptops drop off the domain after a month or so, things get hairy. That and numerous other problems such as an entire network of 5000 machines with TrustedInstaller.exe hanging at 100% CPU etc etc and it's not all smooth. I've got my fair share of horror stories there.

One of our enterprise clients has just bought 500 Chromebooks and we integrated OpenID in our application and no one has to deal with AD, SSO is sorted and zero management overhead. I really like this solution. If someone could build a standalone product with equal quality it would destroy Microsoft overnight. Their ops team is 4 people and two of them are network people to keep the pipes (and APs) working.

And of course there is FreeIPA and PolicyKit as a contender but that's not really there yet.

Re: Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place

#302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is slow? Compared to what? In what task? Running a game? Boot time? Opening Firefox? I have problems with Windows, but it's the fastest desktop os I think, mostly because it's graphics stack is way the best of all. Running a number crunching C code is exactly the same on Windows or Linux. (See all the benchmarks on the Internet.)

> Windows is slow? Compared to what? In what task? I dual booted a laptop for a while with Vista. (I can't speak to anything later, because I use Linux now, and haven't looked back, so take the appropriate grain of salt.) So with Vista / Gentoo on exactly the same hardware (a Lenovo T61): - boot time on Linux was orders of magnitude faster - WiFi AP connect was significantly faster[1], esp. on resuming from suspend-t…

> I dual booted a laptop for a while with Vista.

To be fair Vista was the slowest NT 6+ OS, especially booting is way faster on Windows 8+.

Re: Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place

#303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows is slow? Compared to what? In what task? Running a game? Boot time? Opening Firefox? I have problems with Windows, but it's the fastest desktop os I think, mostly because it's graphics stack is way the best of all. Running a number crunching C code is exactly the same on Windows or Linux. (See all the benchmarks on the Internet.)

It's really not that fast. The filesystem is a total dog (MFT contention) to the point that manipulating lots of small file is up to two orders of magnitude slower than ext4. This is made bearable thanks to SSDs being on the market. Also the amount of friction getting stuff built and running and maintaining it is detrimental to general productivity meaning you piss execution time out of the window regularly just fixi…

> orders of magnitude slower than ext4.

Haven't tested ext4 and ntfs drivers directly against each other, but an useful trick if you ever need to copy millions of small files from NTFS is to mount it on Linux because Linux driver can work with it way way faster than Windows one.

Re: Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place

#304
post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't say I'm surprised to see people eager to point out how Windows sucks. And sure, maybe it does. However, the fundamental point you're missing is that I don't think that Windows was ever positioned as this OS that was designed for every single type of workload out there (not withstanding marketing noise). Windows is a very general purpose OS meant for general purpose 'mainstream' things. Things that hundreds of…

At least you don't ever really need to defragment ext4, unlike NTFS.

You don't need to defragment NTFS either, defragmenter runs in the background. Defragmentation is more an issue of driver and not fs itself, I suspect ext4 does some form of defragmentation itself otherwise I can imagine edge cases that could ruin its day.

Re: Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place

#305

Some questions that immediately come to my mind: - What is the disk size of a shallow clone of a repo (without history)? - Can each developer actually clone the whole thing, or you do partial checkout? - Does the VCS support a checkout of a subfolder (AFAIK mercurial, same as git, does not support it)? - How long does it take to clone the repo / update the repo in the morning? Since people are talking about huge acro…

Most of these questions are answered in the talk. The tl;dr is that you don't clone or check out anything at all: instead, you use CitC to create a workspace, and the entire repository is magically available to you to view or edit. This model precludes offline work, of course. But that's not much of a problem in practice.

I did not follow the links in wired article, and didn't realize there was a link to a youtube talk. Thanks for tl;dr, need to watch the video!

Re: Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place

#307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really not that fast. The filesystem is a total dog (MFT contention) to the point that manipulating lots of small file is up to two orders of magnitude slower than ext4. This is made bearable thanks to SSDs being on the market. Also the amount of friction getting stuff built and running and maintaining it is detrimental to general productivity meaning you piss execution time out of the window regularly just fixi…

> orders of magnitude slower than ext4. Haven't tested ext4 and ntfs drivers directly against each other, but an useful trick if you ever need to copy millions of small files from NTFS is to mount it on Linux because Linux driver can work with it way way faster than Windows one.

Good tip; many thanks.

Re: Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place

#308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes you can blame them for being incorrect. If they don't have a correct and relatively up-to-date figure, they should be clear about that. "Microsoft declined to comment on how many lines of code Windows has now" or "Windows XP used 45 million lines of code, but that was 14 years ago so it's not a very good comparison to anything".

They're not only incorrect but also stating facts out of context. Furthermore, Microsoft doesn't have any obligation to expose their real numbers if they don't want to. If it's ever needed to cite numbers, at least tell what the context is instead of naming some number out of the blue from 15 years ago and assuming it's still the same windows

This makes me think of a parallel world, where all the big IT companies show off there LOC regularly. Starting a "LOC war", as if it would mean anything of value.

Re: Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place

#309
post #13

"The two internet giants (Google and Facebook) are working on an open source version control system that anyone can use to juggle code on a massive scale. It’s based on an existing system called Mercurial. “We’re attempting to see if we can scale Mercurial to the size of the Google repository,” Potvin says, indicating that Google is working hand-in-hand with programming guru Bryan O’Sullivan and others who help overs…

Because Google and Facebook are using Mercurial over Git internally. Edit: And for those that are just shocked that git isn't the answer. Facebook: https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc... Google: http://www.primordia.com/blog/2010/01/23/why-google-uses-mer...

That's not true of Google. At least, not on any of the teams I've worked on. I use a Git wrapper around Piper.

Re: Google Is 2B Lines of Code, All in One Place

#310
post #67

Really? This article sounds very over simplified, but I haven't worked at google so I wouldn't know. I'm assuming if you want to change some much depended on library, there's a way to up the version number so you don't hose all your downstream users. That's the way it worked at Amazon at least. Also, I wonder why the people in the story think Google's codebase is larger than that of other tech giants, not that it rea…

The whole point of one big repository is being able to avoid versioning and always work at head.
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