Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
A History of IDEs at Google
41–50 of 333 posts
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#42The 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
#43The 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
#44Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#45There'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…
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#46The 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…
They have a ton of other software in 2026. And they have a pretty diverse (and diversifying) income stream today. Like 30-40% from non-ads.
Is it worth it? That’s for them to say, but they can ramp up cloud services at scale pretty fast as a core competency.
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#47There'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…
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#48There'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…
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#49I 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
Re: A History of IDEs at Google
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
What is Google3?
One is a framework called Wiz, which renders the frontend for a bunch of Google web apps. You can imagine that the Wiz team might want to refactor an API, but not have to worry about different apps using different versions. In a monorepo, they can just find all the callsites and update them in the same commit that makes the API change. There's no package.json in google3 - everything builds from HEAD. Therefore, the commit that makes a breaking change is also the commit that fixes the would-be breakage.
This architecture evolved. Google used to use Perforce, which was a common commercial version control system before Git. Google had to figure out how to express the dependencies between packages in the monorepo (which can be in different languages with different build tools). They eventually created Bazel, which expresses those dependencies and orchestrates their build tools.
Build orchestration took a few attempts. Google3 is the third version of the monorepo, that is, the one that uses Bazel for dependency management.