4 ms·

Is it really fair to compare the amount of code in windows server to the total amount of code that google maintains? Google has many different software projects

by macrael 16y ago

Is it really fair to compare the amount of code in windows server to the total amount of code that google maintains? Google has many different software projects, what is the biggest? Search? Android? Gmail? Compare one project to a server operating system and my guess is that the OS is going to be an order of magnitude larger. An OS is an enormously complicated piece of software with lots of co-dependent parts. That's what led the to this pretty horribly complicated source management system.

wtallis 16y ago
Google's stuff may be a lot more modular than Windows, but that's not to say that there aren't inter-dependencies. Google's web services all share just a few back-end technologies (MapReduce, GFS, BigTable) that are comparable to an OS kernel, with things like GMail and Docs hanging off like subsystems. But even things like Gmail, Docs, Calender, Search, etc. aren't even close to independent. The GMail people need to collaborate with the Docs people to handle attachments and the Calendar people to handle to-do lists and event invitations and the GTalk and Voice people to implement the voice and video chat and phone calling. The Picasa people need to collaborate with the the Google Earth and Maps people to handle geotagging, and the GWT (probably) people to deal with the web interface. The Android people need to collaborate with everybody who works on the front-ends of all the other products in order to develop mobile versions or integrate them more deeply in to the OS. Even if the "collaboration" in many of these instances is mostly limited to using an API published by the other group, there's still the need to make sure that those APIs are sufficient to accomplish the task at hand, and obviously Google's UI consistency between products is more than an accident. I think that to the extent that Microsoft's code is more tightly coupled than Google's or that of a desktop Linux distribution, it's mostly their own fault.
joshu 16y ago
android is kept in git, not the main archive.

by macrael 16y ago

wtallis 16y ago

Google's stuff may be a lot more modular than Windows, but that's not to say that there aren't inter-dependencies. Google's web services all share just a few back-end technologies (MapReduce, GFS, BigTable) that are comparable to an OS kernel, with things like GMail and Docs hanging off like subsystems. But even things like Gmail, Docs, Calender, Search, etc. aren't even close to independent. The GMail people need to collaborate with the Docs people to handle attachments and the Calendar people to handle to-do lists and event invitations and the GTalk and Voice people to implement the voice and video chat and phone calling. The Picasa people need to collaborate with the the Google Earth and Maps people to handle geotagging, and the GWT (probably) people to deal with the web interface. The Android people need to collaborate with everybody who works on the front-ends of all the other products in order to develop mobile versions or integrate them more deeply in to the OS. Even if the "collaboration" in many of these instances is mostly limited to using an API published by the other group, there's still the need to make sure that those APIs are sufficient to accomplish the task at hand, and obviously Google's UI consistency between products is more than an accident. I think that to the extent that Microsoft's code is more tightly coupled than Google's or that of a desktop Linux distribution, it's mostly their own fault.

joshu 16y ago

android is kept in git, not the main archive.