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Whew. Lots of complaints from people who probably will never need to use this code. If you need docs just read the .h files, they have extensive comments. I’m
by MarkMarine 3y ago
Whew. Lots of complaints from people who probably will never need to use this code.
If you need docs just read the .h files, they have extensive comments. I’m sure they’ll add them or maybe, just maybe, you could write some to contribute.
This would have made some of my previous work much easier, it’s really nice to see google open source this.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ls612 3y agoI think it’s that it’s not at all obvious how to even build the damn thing so at least a little bit of readme would have been nice. I agree with the sentiment this looks like a super cool tool.
- PaulHoule 3y agoIt says you're supposed to leave a ticket if you have questions or comments... A README file isn't much to ask for.
- MarkMarine 3y agoI’m not saying it’s too much to ask for, but also, when you’re doing distributed in memory graph mining (which means you’ve got an application with a big enough graph that you need to do this, and the technical expertise to need the algorithms in this open source package) maybe it’s expected that you can read the bazel files and bazel docs yourself and figure it out. Or just write a make file and cut all the bazel build optimization out. They don’t put instructions on how to start a F1 car inside the cockpit, you don’t hop into a fighter jet and look for the push to start easy button, it’s expected that when you’re at that level you bring expertise.
- PaulHoule 3y agoYeah, and somebody who is that smart can probably pack their data structures efficiently and find an approximation to do the job on a macbook pro that people with too many resources need a 1000 machine cluster to do. And get the coding and the computation done in the time that the C++ compiler is still chewing on the headers of the bloated library. (At times I’ve been that guy.) But seriously, there is such a thing as industrialization. Google is notorious though for hiring 180 IQ people and getting them to perform at a 35 IQ level because there the documentation makes no sense, a procedure which should be done in one step really takes 300, fighting with C++, etc. They can afford to do it because it is just so profitable to help that guy who shows up on every. single. video. roll. who says “you can’t lose weight by exercising”, “you can’t lose weight by cutting carbs” who links to some video that drones on hours and hours and signs you up for some subscription you can never cancel to sell scam supplements. Shame on them. BTW, with high-complexity software there is enough question that you got it working right that you expect a significant process of testing that it works for your application. For instance if you got a hydrocode for simulating the explosion of a nuclear weapon you would not take for granted that you had built it properly and were using it properly until you'd done a lot of validation work. A system like that isn't a product unless it comes with that validation suite. The same is true for automated trading software (gonna hook it up straight to the market without validation? hope you have $100M to burn!) ... now there was that time a really famous CS professor e-mailed me a short C program that was said to do something remarkable that crashed before it even got into main() which did teach me a thing about C but that's not what a professional programmer does.
- MarkMarine 3y agoI agree with all of this. Its just frustrating that all the comments about an interesting library seem to be customer service complaints from people who never need to reach for this library. I was hoping for a real discussion, something I could learn from.
- PaulHoule 3y agoReally though an open source product has not really been released until there is documentation walking through setting it up and doing some simple thing with it. As it is I am really not so sure what it is, what kind of hardware it can run on, etc. Do you really think it got 117 Github stars from people who were qualified to evaluate it? (I’d consider myself qualified to evaluate it.. If I put two weeks into futzing with it.) Every open source release I’ve done that’s been successful has involved me spending almost as much time in documentation, packaging and fit-and-finish work as I did getting working it well enough for me. It’s why I dread the thought of an open source YOShInOn as much as I get asked for it. Sometimes though it is just a bitch. I have some image curation projects and was thinking of setting up some “booru” software and found there wasn’t much out there that was easy to install because there are so many moving parts and figured I’d go for the motherf4r of them all because at least the docker compose here is finite https://github.com/danbooru/danbooru https://github.com/danbooru/danbooru even if it means downloading 345TB of images over my DSL connection.
- riku_iki 3y ago> If you need docs just read the .h files curious if this is typical dev experience inside google..
- dekhn 3y agoI think in most cases, back when I worked there, I would have instead searched the monorepo for targets that depended on this library (an easy lookup), and look at how they used it. Some code libraries had excellent docs (recordio, sstable, mapreduce). But yes, reading the header file was often the best place to start.
- MarkMarine 3y agoI’m not at google so I’ve got no idea. Reading the code, especially the header files, seems to be pretty standard as far as what I see in non-open source code. So, it’s been my typical dev experience, I’d say if you’re somewhere that has gleaming, easy to understand docs that are actually up to date with the code you all have too much time on your hands, but I serially work at startups that are running to market.
- riku_iki 3y agoHeader file gives you a view into some narrow window of the system, API, pipeline, and you probably have no idea which header files are important and which are part of some internal implementation. 10 mins spent on readme with some high level details is investment with 100x return for lib users.
- MarkMarine 3y agoThese header files have “doc”like comments in them.
- riku_iki 3y agothat's cool, not sure how it addresses points I described though.
- helsinki 3y agoThe .proto files are the documentation everyone is looking for.