Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2016)
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Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderI feel terrible for anyone who sees this and thinks, “ah! I should move to a monorepo!” I’ve seen it several times, and the thing they all seem to overlook is that Google has THOUSANDS of hours of effort put into the tooling for their monorepo. Slapping lots of projects into a single git repo without investing in tooling will not be a pleasant experience.
Seems like this gets re-posted every few months. We don't actually have a single repository, although Google3/Piper really is huge and dominant. Android, Chrome, Fuchsia, and myriads of other projects don't exist in the monorepo (well, they are mirrored there) because the tooling and libraries there are really geared towards server deployment, not devices.
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 2
- Total points
- 607
- Total comments
- 403
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018-05-31 | Advantages of a monolithic codebase (2016) | awin | 2 | 0 |
| 2018-07-02 | Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2016) | ojosilva | 1 | 0 |
| 2018-07-24 | Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2016)First breakout · Best thread | bwag | 478 | 281 |
| 2020-01-11 | Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2016)Latest 20+ point return | tosh | 112 | 121 |
| 2020-07-25 | Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2016) [pdf] | rickdeveloper | 13 | 1 |
| 2022-11-17 | Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository? (2016) | rsecora | 1 | 0 |