[benreesman]

Dan is diplomatic to a fault. Splitting repos on boundaries that aren’t necessary because of access control, legal obligation, or infrastructure constraint is for people who have nothing better to do.

All the big shops have multiple repositories. They all broke each one out grudgingly and under some kind of pressure.

[exitheone]

That's factually untrue. Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb all have a huge monorepo. Splitting it out is obviously not necessary with the right tools.

[benreesman]

As someone who spent a decade at FB I can assure you that we had as few monorepos as possible. No more, no less.

The danger with mouthing off on HN is that this place is thick as thieves with people who actually do or did what the bloggers whinge on about.

Though in this case, the blogger has worked at all three of MS, Google, and Twitter, so I wouldn’t be quick to disregard him either.

[jeffbee]

Google at least has separate repos for the linux kernel and android, and probably others (chrome/os/ium?). The hugeness of google3 is not in doubt, but the mono-ness may be.

[williamsmj]

No. Twitter absolutely has multiple repos. Some of them are very big, but they certainly have more than one. Why they have > 1 repo is a long story, but the post you're responding to is in the ballpark.

[disgruntledphd2]

And FB have multiple, really, really large monorepos.

[benreesman]

So there was a (I hope flattering) joke behind Simpkins’ back that anyone of his broad-spectrum superiority, as he’s both a world-class hacker and conventionally handsome and consistently articulate that he must be carrying a “lizard”. His nickname was “the Iguana”.

He spent a lot of time optimizing ‘hg’, and one assumes that the Iguana did what could be done.

[8note]

Legal obligation and unnecessary are mutually exlusive