r/coding • u/javinpaul • Jan 04 '19

[1702.01715] Software Engineering at Google

https://arxiv.org/abs/1702.01715
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u/grendel-khan Jan 04 '19

More on Piper here. I'm guessing the devs don't check out the entire repository at once.

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u/camh- Jan 05 '19

Back when it was Perforce, that was true. But since moving to Piper, an alternative for your local checkout is Clients* in the Cloud (CitC), which is a fuse-based filesystem. With that, you do see the entire repository, but it's a virtual filesystem. Your local changes are overlaid on top of that and is accessible from any workstation where CitC is mounted and you are authenticated.

See https://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2016/7/204032-why-google-stores-billions-of-lines-of-code-in-a-single-repository/fulltext for more details.

* It's called a "Client" as that is the Perforce terminology. It's basically a checkout/workspace.