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Comment by falcor84 | Hacker News Reader

>For example, if an engineer is unsure how to use a library, they can find examples just by searching

Isn't that the case with all libraries? How does the monorepo help here?

Discoverability. It's a lot easier to search one repo then it is to search a set of repos. For the latter you need to have all the repos listed somewhere, and have them be accessible.

SourceGraph is great to search in many repos.

SourceGraph is modeled after Google's internal code search tool (to the point I've seen ads on facebook that say "Hey Xoogler, miss code search? Try Sourcegraph").

It's just as easy to index multiple repos as it is to index one, which means that the same goes for searching. Why would it be any different for one as opposed to many?

We use GitLab in the company I work for. There may be repositories created by others in the company, that depend on repos I work on, where I don’t have access to said other repos. So to me these are invisible. If everything was in one monorepo, it’d all be visible to me easily.

That’s more of a culture thing. Your company chose to enforce more granular permissions. Perhaps there are good reasons behind it, e.g. code for different clients being under different contracts and NDAs.

That's a question of policy, not of repo structure. A monorepo can still have certain parts of the repo protected by access control. One repo doesn't mean "all files share one read permission".

> It's a lot easier to search one repo then it is to search a set of repos.

Maybe, but searching any repo or combination of repos with billions of lines of code would be challenging.

Surprisingly not. Code Search is excellent and supports all of the power user features you could possibly want.

Haha, yeah, I’m sure it works for Google. I was trying to say that when searching billions of lines, the challenge is in the fact that it’s billions of lines, not in whether it’s one or multiple repositories.

"searching" how a method is used is as simple as clicking on the symbol.

Think Visual Studio "find all references", but working around the entire company's codebase, not just your current project.

I’m not sure. I also thought that these big repos have to use sparse checkouts to not use too much space on the developers machines. So you would have to use an external code search index anyway.

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