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Comment by tunesmith | Hacker News Reader

One caveat is that if you need to fix a bug in your library in an API-compatible way, you can't reach into all the codebases that are using your library. You can deploy a new version of the microservice, though.

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I mean, you _can_ if you organize your code such that you can. For example, Google's monorepo lets maintainers of a library find all internal usages and fix them. This is one of the benefits Dan Luu notes in http://danluu.com/monorepo/.

I think he means that you can't force all teams that use your library to recompile and pickup the updated code, while if you deploy it as a service, you recompile and redeploy and everyone talking to your service gets the most up-to-date version.

This is a real problem - I recall that Sanjay Ghemawat et al was working on it when I left Google, though I dunno if the solution they came up with is public yet. It's unlikely to seriously affect you unless you're Google-scale, though, by which time you've probably divided everything up into services and aren't taking advice from the Internet anyway. For companies that are a few teams working on a single product, it's easy enough to send a company-wide e-mail saying "Rebuild & redeploy anything that depends upon library X", and if you're doing continuous deployment or deploy only as a single artifact, the problem never affects you anyway.

> I think he means that you can't force all teams that use your library to recompile and pickup the updated code

Does your CI system not automatically build dependent artifacts--

> It's unlikely to seriously affect you unless you're Google-scale, though

--okay, whew. ;)

> you recompile and redeploy and everyone talking to your service gets the most up-to-date version

Sure, but if you do that in place it will still break stuff that assumes it works like the last version, and if you do a versioned API or the like you still can't force all teams to adopt the new version.

You were initially replying to a suggestion explicitly qualifying this with "for small shops". Yes, you most definitely can force all teams that use your library to recompile and pickup the updated code - and it doesn't mean "a company wide email", a realistic scenario would involve standing up, pointing to a specific person and saying "Bob, the new version of my library will also work better for the performance problems you had, pick it up whenever you're ready"; and knowing that it's an exhaustive list of people who need to be informed.

For starters the vast majority of code is developed in-house in non-software companies. The vast number of products are a single team working essentially in a silo, not "a few teams working on a single product".

When people are talking about small companies, it's misleading to think "smaller than Google". Smaller-than-Google is still an enormous quantity of development. Enterprisy practices make much sense in scaling software in companies that are smaller-than-smaller-than-Google. if you hear "small company", think multiple steps further from that, a smaller-than-smaller-than-smaller-than-smaller-than-smaller-than-Google company.

If you need to change your microservice's API in a non-backwards compatible way, you have the exact same problem plus significant operational complexity.

Don't you just create a new one and let the old go obsolete when the "users" switch?

Which is basically what you do for a traditional library as well. Tweak the header so anything being recompiled against it gets a different function signature. Then old apps continue to work, and newly built apps get the fix.

Moderately ironically - this is a place where dynamically loaded libraries are particularly well suited. So long as the API hasn't changed, the library can be patched independently of all the other compiled code.

Of course, there are other limitations this imposes, but it does make it very simple to deploy a new library to all code which uses it.

> you can't reach into all the codebases that are using your library

You can deploy a new version of the dll and applications can pick it up when they restart. Linux will apply security patches this way.

Better, you can do it without a restart is you can serialise current state. That also enforces discipline in defining such state.

Microservices are only a step ahead.

That said, in many cases the cost of a full restart can be accepted.

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