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Why does google have billions of lines of code? This is more of a rhetorical question. As a tech minimalist, the preferrable answer by a long shot would be tha

by fizixer 10y ago

Why does google have billions of lines of code? This is more of a rhetorical question. As a tech minimalist, the preferrable answer by a long shot would be that, internally, Google is keenly aware of the severe bloat and technical debt of their codebase and have clear plans going forward to drastically reduce the scale, by more than 1000x at least, without sacrificing any of the features/bug-fixes/performance of any of the code.

Mahn 10y ago
Realistically, I don't think you can have a minimalist, clean and focused code base with thousands of engineers pounding away at the keyboard. You ought to make some trade offs with that many employees.
- fizixer 10y ago
  That sounds like reverse justification, i.e., Google's operations probably require X lines of clean code added everyday by 10% of the engineers (so ~5000 instead of ~50,000 engineers), but because of the sheer number of engineers Google has, that are supposed to do something continuously to show performance, Google has ended up with ~10 or ~100 X lines of daily bloat accumulation. Sounds like a textbook example of too-many-hands-spoiling-the-broth.
groby_b 10y ago
Right. Google is going to reduce the code size to a million lines of code. For Search, YouTube, Maps, Docs, GMail, Hangouts and all the infrastructure projects that go with it. (And probably a ton of things I forgot to mention) Compare, to, say, Apache alone: 1.8M lines of code. Or Riak: 250,000 lines of code. Just because it sounds like a lot to you doesn't mean it actually is quite as much as you think.
shaftway 10y ago
One of the reasons: at that scale the cost of identifying and refactoring reusable code into shared modules just isn't worth it. Your project may have something in common with my project, but I wouldn't want to refactor my code into something that your project can use because I don't want to maintain that dependency. I expect the reverse to be true, so you often copy code and build very purpose-driven code for your project. It's not like anyone could be well versed in more than a tiny percentage of the entire codebase, so the gains from that kind of reuse just aren't there.

by fizixer 10y ago

Mahn 10y ago

Realistically, I don't think you can have a minimalist, clean and focused code base with thousands of engineers pounding away at the keyboard. You ought to make some trade offs with that many employees.

fizixer 10y ago
That sounds like reverse justification, i.e., Google's operations probably require X lines of clean code added everyday by 10% of the engineers (so ~5000 instead of ~50,000 engineers), but because of the sheer number of engineers Google has, that are supposed to do something continuously to show performance, Google has ended up with ~10 or ~100 X lines of daily bloat accumulation. Sounds like a textbook example of too-many-hands-spoiling-the-broth.

groby_b 10y ago

Right. Google is going to reduce the code size to a million lines of code. For Search, YouTube, Maps, Docs, GMail, Hangouts and all the infrastructure projects that go with it. (And probably a ton of things I forgot to mention) Compare, to, say, Apache alone: 1.8M lines of code. Or Riak: 250,000 lines of code. Just because it sounds like a lot to you doesn't mean it actually is quite as much as you think.

shaftway 10y ago

One of the reasons: at that scale the cost of identifying and refactoring reusable code into shared modules just isn't worth it. Your project may have something in common with my project, but I wouldn't want to refactor my code into something that your project can use because I don't want to maintain that dependency. I expect the reverse to be true, so you often copy code and build very purpose-driven code for your project. It's not like anyone could be well versed in more than a tiny percentage of the entire codebase, so the gains from that kind of reuse just aren't there.