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I've been following monorepo support in git for many years (I'm usually the person who knows the most about tools like SCM and build systems on my team, and I spend most of my time saying "no, the hot new thing doesn't work well in practice yet", or "unfortunately it still has some significant downsides for us as a team"). Yes, the monorepo story today is better than ever, and in the last 6 months or so, a few developments have made it maybe even workable for teams like mine. I haven't seriously kicked the tires on the latest developments yet, so it's possible we're in a golden age as you say, but I'm skeptical. Just being realistic, but "better than ever" doesn't mean "good enough to use without needing significant time investment and deployment complexity cost for medium sized organizations". As an example, things like VFSforgit carried unreasonable deployment complexity cost compared to the benefit. Ironically, the monorepo discussion reminds me of the discussions around complex architectures (SoA, fault tolerance, microservices, etc.) vs. simple architectures (file/SQL/dumb KV store and monoliths, etc.). For complex architectures, the benefits vs system size is a hockey stick, starting flat and negative, then rising somewhat linearly until it finally becomes beneficial at a certain (arguably very large) size. For monorepos, given the actually existing and available tooling, it's more of a U shape -- for tiny systems, it's great, becomes problematic for medium sized orgs who usually split repos after reaching painful size, then plateaus and slowly ticks up again when you become Twitter or whatnot. I think most of us live in the early phase or the middle phase, and almost no organizations live in the final phase (lots of developers who post on HN do though...). I don't knock anyone who manages to do it at medium or large size with the current tools, especially if they manage by having discipline rather than having to spend a lot of time doing meta-work rather than their actual work, but IME I've found even that to not be worth it. |