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https://mobile.twitter.com/dvyukov/status/1169544167871131653 https://mobile.twitter.com/dvyukov/status/116954416787113165... This tweet perfectly captures why

by bt848 7y ago

https://mobile.twitter.com/dvyukov/status/1169544167871131653 https://mobile.twitter.com/dvyukov/status/116954416787113165... This tweet perfectly captures why all bug fixes must have tests. Linux has no tests and no testing culture and it is 17 million lines of juicy hot garbage. Google is mostly tests and it is one of the largest and most successful C++ projects in history of our industry. I feel justified in standing my ground when reviewing under-tested code.

YZF 7y ago
> Google is mostly tests and it is one of the largest and most successful C++ projects in history of our industry. I'm not quite sure what you mean here? Are you talking about Search? Ads? Cloud? Self driving cars? Google has various products of varying business and technical success levels. Some stuff I feel is a good example of quality software (let's say Go for example or maybe Maps) and some stuff seems to just be very poor software (let's say Google Hangouts Chat or Google Sheets). Some stuff is really good business and some gets cancelled (with little apparent correlation to quality). Google is so rich that perhaps it is succeeding despite some practices and not because of them. It's initial success probably predates all these practices and there's plenty of quality software in the history of the industry that has been produced using a variety of other practices. Even if you are right and Google is the most successful C++ code base ever that's still not evidence that some particular practice is the cause of that. There is no way to measure any of this and "feeling" doesn't really cut it. Some practices apply more to certain kinds of software and possibly less to others. Doesn't Google use Linux? For juicy hot garbage it's done pretty well. With a budget that's a fraction of what Google has. It's also not C++. re-EDIT: Another thing to note is that Google has a large number of engineers developing internal tools, build systems, test engineers etc. With all the automation around dealing with flaky tests and testing in general at scale perhaps this works better for Google. Other companies who do not have the luxury of having 100's of engineers work on their build or test systems may run into different problems when they try to do things the Google way. Because Google is overall fairly opaque (the open bits are exceptions) it's hard to really come to a conclusion about how well they do software. I've heard different stories from different sources and I'll bet there's lots of internal variation as well. The success as a company is undeniable but there's more to that than software.

by bt848 7y ago

YZF 7y ago

> Google is mostly tests and it is one of the largest and most successful C++ projects in history of our industry. I'm not quite sure what you mean here? Are you talking about Search? Ads? Cloud? Self driving cars? Google has various products of varying business and technical success levels. Some stuff I feel is a good example of quality software (let's say Go for example or maybe Maps) and some stuff seems to just be very poor software (let's say Google Hangouts Chat or Google Sheets). Some stuff is really good business and some gets cancelled (with little apparent correlation to quality). Google is so rich that perhaps it is succeeding despite some practices and not because of them. It's initial success probably predates all these practices and there's plenty of quality software in the history of the industry that has been produced using a variety of other practices. Even if you are right and Google is the most successful C++ code base ever that's still not evidence that some particular practice is the cause of that. There is no way to measure any of this and "feeling" doesn't really cut it. Some practices apply more to certain kinds of software and possibly less to others. Doesn't Google use Linux? For juicy hot garbage it's done pretty well. With a budget that's a fraction of what Google has. It's also not C++. re-EDIT: Another thing to note is that Google has a large number of engineers developing internal tools, build systems, test engineers etc. With all the automation around dealing with flaky tests and testing in general at scale perhaps this works better for Google. Other companies who do not have the luxury of having 100's of engineers work on their build or test systems may run into different problems when they try to do things the Google way. Because Google is overall fairly opaque (the open bits are exceptions) it's hard to really come to a conclusion about how well they do software. I've heard different stories from different sources and I'll bet there's lots of internal variation as well. The success as a company is undeniable but there's more to that than software.