[pork]

On the contrary, they build specialized products for their clients; they just don't build consumer products. They build very complicated, extremely expensive products based on cutting edge research that they perform in their own labs, which is why this investment is solid.

I heard an IBM guy give a talk at a research conference recently, about a 1U rack system that processes 8 live feeds of traffic, automatically classifies vehicle color and type, and optionally registration, so you can ask queries like "show me all red sedan cars traveling north on monday the 8th". It was part of their better cities initiative.

[malkia]

As an example, this reminds me a bit about P4 (Perforce www.perforce.com). It seems to be not that well known as say git, or other versioning systems, but in reality it's widely used in the game development, and last I've heard google, Microsoft and other big companies do use it (or use some licensed source code based version of it).

[ori_b]

Perforce is unpleasant to use, but it scales effectively to positively massive codebases with large binary blobs and many developers.

[malkia]

Perforce is well deployed on variety of systems. Git is fine, but cygwin's version can get broken due to fork() not always forking (no one to blame here, the cygwin folks are doing an enourmous job to translate over).

P4 also comes with approachable UI (p4win (MFC), and the not so pleasant, but then again better P4v (Qt)).

The command line is one of the easiest things ever p4 has did. For large binary files it's very well done, there is good customization of how many levels of file log to be kept.

But the best feature it's is changelists. The CL (heh, not common lisp) becomes part of your language at work, such as - get this CL, or shelve this CL, unshelve that one. It's very clear to a lot of people (coders, artists, production) what it is, and how it works.

I'm still puzzled by "git stash" or push/pull here and there (granted I'm n00b, and it would take me a lot of time to progress).

P4 is like good action game, GIT is like hard-core RPG where you need to level all the time, and learn magic, collect artifacts (that is scripts, and .gitignores).

[cobrausn]

I have worked for at least one game development studio that uses perforce on a massive Unreal-Engine codebase. I have no major complaints about it - I'd imagine the primary reason it was used was for administration purposes (tighter control by an admin / senior level developer). You know, so us n00bs didn't wreck everything at every available opportunity.

[drewda]

The cool open-source kids (me included :) may use git, but big corporations have been using Perforce for years: http://www.perforce.com/customers/solutions

[dfc]

I think that one of the reasons perforce is used at large companies is the audit log / permissions model makes it easy to meet certain regulatory hurdles.