[woadwarrior01]

I work at one of the monorepo companies that you mention and there’s some truth to the “too slow” part. Although it’s it’s been a lot better lately (largely, due to the efforts of the internal version control dev teams), I’ve noticed at times in the past that you could do a ‘<insert vcs> pull’, go on a 15 minute break and it wouldn’t be done by the time you’re back.

Personally, I think there’s a place for mono repos and there’s a place for smaller independent repos. If a project is independent and decoupled from the rest of the tightly coupled code base (for instance things which get opesourced), it makes no sense to shove it into a huge monorepo.

[falsedan]

I hate how these monorepo pieces gloss over the CI requirements. Just checkout the code that's affected by the change? Either you have a shared buid job that adds thoussands of builds a day & matching a commit to a build takes ages, or you have a plethora of jobs for each subrepo and Jenkins eats all the disk space with stale workspaces. And let's not talk about how to efficiently clone a large repo... our big repo took 5 minutes to clone from scratch, which killed our target time of 10 minutes from push to test results. We ran git mirrors on our build nodes to have fresh git objects to shallow/reference clone from to get it down to 30 seconds, and the whole system had to work perfectly or else hundreds of devs would be blocked waiting to see if their changes could be merged.