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by adambyrtek
5260 days ago
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Hacker News has a short attention span and this probably won't be seen by many, but I'll try to answer your question nevertheless. There are several factors I'd like to mention. 1. Most importantly, the version control head is always the point of reference, and the burden of merging is on people who keep long-lived pending changes. This means that conflicts are resolved as soon as possible by a person who actually knows the context, instead of being postponed until a dreaded merge window. Ultimately, a programmer pursuing refactoring is only responsible for making sure it works on the head, and should announce the change so that others are prepared for merging. 2. There are some huge code bases at Google, but nowhere near the size of Windows. On the other hand, I'm sure that even Windows has to be separated into more or less decoupled components. When I doubted that you work on the same code with thousands of other programmers I was thinking in terms of components, not final products. 3. Cultural aspect shouldn't be disregarded. Code hygiene is encouraged at Google, and some people volunteering their 20% time to help with that. Moreover, there are some custom tools that make global refactorings much easier and safer. Hope that was helpful. |
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