Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by koonsolo | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

koonsolo

In git I fully agree, and I wonder which company successfully runs a monorepo in git.

For me, I prefer git submodules, which seem to have the benefit of both monorepo and separate repo's.

View on HN

> I wonder which company successfully runs a monorepo in git.

Microsoft

For which product is this? It can't be all of them right?

Windows is in one repo at Microsoft, I believe.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-o...

Yeah but they basically wrote their own wrapper around it, which is to say Microsoft has fallen into one of their usual patterns:

1. Picking a trendy tool

2. Mis-using trendy tool

3. Rewriting trendy tool so it's no longer trendy tool but something custom and not quite standards-compliant with it's own weird behaviors and bugs

4. Complain the standard is wrong

They wrote a wrapper around it because git took so much time for every basic operations, even a `git status` would take minutes. But still it's not a fork, you can either use it or not without impacting anyone else using the repo. And they also made it available to everyone, as how good open source citizens should do.

Microsoft does definitely use git, monorepo I am not so sure.

https://www.google.com/search?q=microsoft+monorepo

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/the-largest-git-repo-o...

That doesn't say that everything related to Windows is developed on the same repo, just the kernel and several core components.

How did I miss this! Can you imagine someone claiming Windows is going to be in git as few as 10 years ago? This world never ceases to amaze me. What happened to SourceSafe?

SourceSafe was never used for anything internal major. They had their own custom source control system, based on Perforce, I believe, and then on TFS and then they switched to git.

SourceSafe was something inflicted on SMBs :-D

Interesting, didn't realize that. I haven't worked there but knew some people who did, and they were very proud of dogfooding - I guess at least the OS and IDEs, though maybe not the VCS.

There have been many posts in their tech blogs about why they chose a monorepo

Worth noting that due to the size of the Windows repo, they ended up having to extend git significantly

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/bharry/scaling-git-and-some-b...

https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit

Khan Academy has a monorepo in git. With 10 years of history in it, it's not always pleasant but does come with some advantages.

I've been looking at that approach. We have a large "app" that has a lot of boundaries (parts even being in different languages), but everything is run (love being able to docker-compose up my entire stack) and deployed in unison. However, it does make for a messy single repo.

> I wonder which company successfully runs a monorepo in git.

Google. They're not using git, but their own scm: https://research.google/pubs/pub45424/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com