4 ms·

facebook, google, airbnb, quora, many more all use monorepo obviously there are many others who do not use monorepo (amazon comes to mind) but it's reasonable

• msangi 8y ago
  All the companies have in common a huge budget they can invest on their build systems to overcome the shortcomings of monorepos. They do have some benefits, but they also come with an immense cost
  • patejam 8y ago
    But that's what the OP's quote is saying. "large" companies use them.
  • huac 8y ago
    all of those companies were once small too
• ratRaces 8y ago
  A monorepo isn't particularly innovative, if the technical subgroups can create arbitrary subdirectories and branch ad infinitum. Of course it's easy to work with a monorepo, when you can create a folder to stash your stuff in, bury important stuff deep in a nested tree under your home root, and then hide iterations in branches you own. That's what every smart person does in repos they have no control over.
• bluGill 8y ago
  Many companies do use a monorepo. Many other companies do not. There are trade offs.
• jhenkens 8y ago
  Microsoft uses it for Windows as well, which was so large they wrote their own git filesystem to power it.
• vruiz 8y ago
  Does anybody know how these companies development environments look like? I know about Piper at Google but how do the rest manage? Does every single engineer have the entire monorepo in their machines?
  • YawningAngel 8y ago
    Most places I know of use Git Virtual File System or equivalents.
    • vruiz 8y ago
      It is my understanding that VFSForGit only works on Windows.
      • filoleg 8y ago
        The github repo has instructions for running it on Mac and says that the stable Mac version is under active development.
  • Shish2k 8y ago
    At facebook, a virtual filesystem (https://github.com/facebookexperimental/eden https://github.com/facebookexperimental/eden) + change monitor (https://facebook.github.io/watchman/ https://facebook.github.io/watchman/) = source control operations run in O(files I have modified) instead of O(size of repository) time
    • vruiz 8y ago
      Very interesting, thanks!
• venantius 8y ago
  Airbnb uses a monorepo for JVM-based project but most of Airbnb's code at least as of mid-2017 was not run on the JVM and was hosted multi-repo.
  • fjp 8y ago
    What are AirBnb's unique scaling issues other than just being a web app with tons of usage? Uber has navigation, route optimization, queuing, etc. Facebook has to propagate activity our to massive and complex social network graphs. I'm not discounting the toughness of operating at Airbnb's scale, but from my limited understanding it seems like they are not solving a new problem.
    • novok 8y ago
      Map search, automatic dynamic pricing, predicting busy periods, predicting user & provider preferences, etc.
  • huac 8y ago
    i was a data scientist so i knew of monorail but never touched that side of things :)
• chairleader 8y ago
  til! Most of my experience with large, single-repository projects are just plain monoliths. The design goal we strive for tends to be the microservice architecture, assuming that isolation of responsibility leads to more maintainability, better decision making, etc. I can see how, with a well disciplined team, the monorepo could have the best of both worlds.
• twic 8y ago
  Notably, Netflix doesn't (or least didn't): https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/towards-true-continuous-integration-distributed-repositories-and-dependencies-2a2e3108c051 https://medium.com/netflix-techblog/towards-true-continuous-...