3 ms·
The simple reason is that Mercurial and git were way too slow for large repos, and FB wanted a monorepo for productivity reasons. It's cheaper to fund this proj
by reissbaker 4y ago
The simple reason is that Mercurial and git were way too slow for large repos, and FB wanted a monorepo for productivity reasons. It's cheaper to fund this project than reduce engineering productivity by even 1% at the scale of FB.
Google did exactly the same thing, but hasn't open-sourced their tools.
Projects to drive incremental productivity make not a lot of sense for small companies, but become immensely valuable at very large companies. A 1% improvement if you have an engineering staff of even just 10k is worth 100 engineers, and FB is much larger than 10k.
- astrange 4y agoJust as "inventing your own source control system" is a hobby, "being a very large engineering organization" is a hobby. FB and Google started with infinite money spigots and used it to hire a lot of people who make a lot of commits; if you laid them off, or if you canceled half the remaining Google products they haven't already canceled, not all that much would change.
- reissbaker 4y agoGoogle and FB each killed off earlier competitors who had similar spigots. The idea that you can simply discover an "infinite money spigot" once, sit back, and reap the rewards from it forever, is not borne out by anything in humanity's history.