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Comment by apalmer | Hacker News Reader

that stood out to me too... not the monorepo really, but the fact its a monorepo of a billion lines of code. seems almost impossible to maintain when you have a dependency change at the lowest levels that affects numerous projects.If i am understanding google was in a situation where they had to update every project that used typescript inside the entire company at the same time, that seems untenable.

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Whether it's a monorepo or not doesn't change the fact that you have a billion lines of code to maintain, but at least this way they're forced to make changes consistently. The alternative would be doing it piecemeal with a dozen versions of dependencies propagating due to fragmentation, which is way way worse.

Here's an article from a maintainer of a framework library (Angular): https://medium.com/@Jakeherringbone/you-too-can-love-the-mon...

Something like this might only be possible due to their tooling and test coverage. So when you change something, you immediately get alerted of broken tests.

Mostly it means that you have to be really thoughtful when introducing a breaking change to a low level library.

Or you can YOLO / Leroy Jenkins the change and let everyone else fix the breakage you create, or see if they demand a rollback.

They will not only demand a rollback but also do it. Besides, low level changes at this scale require a copious amount of approvals.

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