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

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

#41

Post by scrollaway »

sytse wrote: post #39

So a monolithic codebase makes it easier to make an organization wide change. Microservices make it easier to have people work and ship in independent teams. The interesting thing is that your can have have microservices with a monolithic codebase (as Google and Facebook are comprised of many services). But you can also have a monolithic service with many codebases (like our GitLab that uses 800+ gems that live in se…

I'd be interested on an analysis of the meta-differences between those, but I think one of the main ones is a monolithic codebase makes it massively harder to open source components. I'm sure that, working on GitLab, you can agree with that - if GitLab were a massive, monolithic codebase and you wanted to open source specific parts of it, it'd be a huge pain.

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

#42

Post by bigtunacan »

grouseway wrote: post #25
lighthawk wrote: post #6

"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…

Why not IBM? Why not Microsoft? Is that what the HN crowd has turned into? You now have to justify the non mainstream solution like a scared mega-corp career drone who will only go with the safest bet? Git isn't so awesome that it's inconceivable that people would be willing to use something else.

Personally; I wondered the same thing as the parent, why not Git? For me, this thought was not in a, "How could they possibly not choose Git!?", but more along the lines of, "There are a lot of smart people working at Google; I wonder what technical aspects of Mercurial might make it more suited to such a large code repository than Git?"

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

#44

Post by rakoo »

sghi wrote: post #15
lighthawk wrote: post #6

"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…

I believe that Facebook ran into problems scaling Git, outlined here - https://code.facebook.com/posts/218678814984400/scaling-merc...

It looks to me like mercurial is easier to hack on than Git (written in clean Python vs written in C), and in their initial stage both mercurial and git weren't up to the task.

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

#45

Post by guelo »

k33n wrote: post #4

Comparing "Google" to Windows isn't really a fair comparison. I'm sure all of the code that represents products that Microsoft has in the wild far exceeds 2B lines.

Agree especially since Google's repo contains their version of almost the entire Microsoft Office suite.

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

#46

Post by oakhaven »

kuschku wrote: post #36
thomashabets2 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why Google is so unsuccessful at scaling technical solutions, unlike you they're not forward-thinking.

No, it’s not that they are unsuccessful, it’s that they are unable to maintain it properly. Already today they have tons of open security issues. Or think about April 1st, when they set a Access-Control-Location: * header on google.com because someone wrote the com.google easteregg. Read the post from the SoundCloud dude from yesterday to find out how to do software management properly (hint: modularization is everyt…

link to the post?

Neither HN search nor Google search show anything to "modularization is everything".

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

#47

Post by scrollaway »

grouseway wrote: post #25
lighthawk wrote: post #6

"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…

Why not IBM? Why not Microsoft? Is that what the HN crowd has turned into? You now have to justify the non mainstream solution like a scared mega-corp career drone who will only go with the safest bet? Git isn't so awesome that it's inconceivable that people would be willing to use something else.

> Is that what the HN crowd has turned into?

It's a legitimate question, damn it. Especially if the chosen solution is not mainstream.

You don't pick non-mainstream solutions "just because". You do pick mainstream solutions "just because". As in, "just because" they are tried and true, "just because" it's familiar to devs, etc.

So let me ask the reverse question: Is that what the HN crowd [sic] has turned into? You can no longer ask the reasons behind your tech choices?

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

#48

Post by sytse »

scrollaway wrote: post #41
sytse wrote: post #39

So a monolithic codebase makes it easier to make an organization wide change. Microservices make it easier to have people work and ship in independent teams. The interesting thing is that your can have have microservices with a monolithic codebase (as Google and Facebook are comprised of many services). But you can also have a monolithic service with many codebases (like our GitLab that uses 800+ gems that live in se…

I'd be interested on an analysis of the meta-differences between those, but I think one of the main ones is a monolithic codebase makes it massively harder to open source components. I'm sure that, working on GitLab, you can agree with that - if GitLab were a massive, monolithic codebase and you wanted to open source specific parts of it, it'd be a huge pain.

Indeed, if you have a monolithic codebase releasing your code for other people use is much harder. In git it is possible to create a separate repository for it (using subtree and filter-branch). But the harder part is versioning and release management. At Google they avoid the cost of versioning their services and the release management around that, but this makes it really hard to have the outside world use their code. Maybe this is hard anyway since their code probably depends on a lot of services common to Google (GFS, BigTable). This is probably why they can't release Borg/Omega but have to make Kubernetes instead.

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

#49

Post by DanBC »

oakhaven wrote: post #46
kuschku wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, it’s not that they are unsuccessful, it’s that they are unable to maintain it properly. Already today they have tons of open security issues. Or think about April 1st, when they set a Access-Control-Location: * header on google.com because someone wrote the com.google easteregg. Read the post from the SoundCloud dude from yesterday to find out how to do software management properly (hint: modularization is everyt…

link to the post? Neither HN search nor Google search show anything to "modularization is everything".

Perhaps this?

http://philcalcado.com/2015/09/08/how_we_ended_up_with_micro...?

(That question mark is part of the URL)

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