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Comment by wunderwuzzi23 | Hacker News Reader

That's cool. I did something similar in the early days with Google Bard when data visualization was added, which I believe was when the ability to run code got introduced.

One question I always had was what the user "grte" stands for...

Btw. here the tricks I used back then to scrape the file system:

https://embracethered.com/blog/posts/2024/exploring-google-b...

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The "runtime" is a google internal distribution of libc + binutils that is used for linking binaries within the monolithic repo, "google3".

This decoupling of system libraries from the OS itself is necessary because it otherwise becomes unmanageable to ensure "google3 binaries" remain runnable on both workstations and production servers. Workstations and servers each have their own Linux distributions, and each also needs to change over time.

Of course, this meant that some tools got stuck on some old glibc from like 2007.

IIRC Google has a policy whereby all google3 binaries must be rebuilt within a 6-month window. This allows teams to age-out support for old versions of things, including glibc. grte supports having multiple multiple versions of itself installed side-by-side to allow for transition periods ("v5" in the article).

Sure, I'm talking about things linked against grtev4

It says in the article - Google Runtime Environment

grte is probably "google runtime environment", I would imagine.

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