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Comment by gladwindos | Hacker News Reader

I’ve heard about how huge companies like google are using a giant monorepo, and I honestly don’t understand how that could work. But I guess it does…

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It's sometimes important to remind ourselves that just because we can't see understanding in something doesn't mean there isn't understanding in it, and it might take effort on our part.

It's not a negative thing as much as an opportunity to grow if we ask ourselves to learn and see it as an opportunity.

The company I work at is fairly large, with thousands of engineers, and we use monorepos. It works extremely well. What about them makes you think it can't work?

We use monorepos in my company too, but we use one for each product, and it works really well for that. But for the whole company to be in a single monorepo just seems like it would require a lot of effort to maintain.

We have several projects per monorepo, and they are massive, currently being merged into a single one. Anything specific about maintainability that scares you?

> ...we use monorepos.

MonorepoS, in the plural?

Yes. We used to have dozens of repos, but started to merge them slowly. Nowadays we have 3 large ones, but the goal is 1.

So you have Trirepo, not monorepo.

Looking forward to the birepo.

with lots of controls and custom tooling

Facebook open sourced theirs

https://github.com/facebook/sapling

This looks interesting! I'll check it out and maybe it will help me wrap my head around how they handle the complexity.

If you aren't worried about partial checkouts & permissions

The biggest issue is deciding what to build across developers and their branches & products. You don't want to build the world on every commit, but you do want to ensure that you are building what the code would look like post-merge before the merge.

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