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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

> What the heck is the other 991000000?

Says right in the article: various config and dependency files, presumably both as caches (where everyone would generate the same product) or as a record of where things stood on at time t.

For example:

> In some cases, notably Go programs, build files can be generated (and updated) automatically, since the dependency information in the BUILD files is (often) an abstraction of the dependency information in the source files. But they are nevertheless checked in to the repository.

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So basically somebody can write a script to put this Build file in gitignore, save the company millions of dollars, and get promoted for it?

People rarely get promoted for saving money.

Finance people do.

Good point. I meant software engineers rarely get promoted for saving money.

This does not apply in this post though.

There are thousands of SWEs working on systems to save money for Google.

They sure do at Amazon. Frugality is one of the explicit leadership principles and initiatives often have cost saving as a primary goal and always as a secondary goal.

They don't use git or any other distributed version control system, so there is no incentive to keep it small. And anything outside the source control system isn't accessible to all the tools that use it, so it would introduce complexity.

There are other possible annotations in the build file.

You can get an idea of what it looks like by reading the Bazel docs: https://bazel.build/versions/master/docs/be/overview.html

Storing a few text files at Google doesn't cost millions of dollars, BTW.

Then you have to run a tool that processes .go source files in order to perform dependency analysis. Consistency is a virtue.

Nah, because it would cost the company billions of dollars in lost productivity waiting for these files to get re-processed every time someone built the thing. Google's general philosophy is that humans are expensive and computers are cheap, so pretty much anything that helps the humans go faster is a going to be a net benefit in the long run.

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