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Piper, Google's 2 Billion Line Code Repository, Needs A Cool Display
Google's 2 billion lines of code sit in a single repository that is available to all 25,000 Google engineers. The world's biggest single code repository?
It’s not just that all 2 billion lines of code sit inside a single system available to just about every engineer inside the company. It’s that this system gives Google engineers an unusual freedom to use and combine code from across myriad projects. “When you start a new project,” Potvin tells WIRED, “you have a wealth of libraries already available to you. Almost everything has already been done.” What’s more, engineers can make a single code change and instantly deploy it across all Google services. In updating one thing, they can update everything.
I hope Google engineers have a really cool way to display that code. Isaac Asimov has the answer, of course.
In his wonderful 1950's Foundation series, Asmiov describes a special system for accessing, keeping track of, and modifying the entirety of the Seldon plan. It was called the Prime Radiant:
The long walls of the room glowed to life. Finally, the fine neatly printed equations in black, with an occasional red hairline that wavered through the darker forest like a staggering rillet.
They stood together in the light. Each wall was thirty feet long, and ten high. The writing was small and covered every inch.
"This is not the whole Plan," said the First Speaker. "To get it all upon both walls, the individual equations would have to be reduced to microscopic size - but that is not necessary..."
...The student pointed a finger and as he did so, the line of equations marched down the wall, until the single series of functions he had thought of - one could scarcely have believed that the quick, generalized gesture of the finger to have been sufficient - was at eye-level.
I challenge Google and GitHub to create an interface as cool as this!
Via Wired.
Piper spans about 85 terabytes of data (aka 85,000 gigabytes), and Google’s 25,000 engineers make about 45,000 commits (changes) to the repository each day. That’s some serious activity. While the Linux open source operating spans 15 million lines of code across 40,000 software files, Google engineers modify 15 million lines of code across 250,000 files each week.
"The Prime Radiant can be adjusted to your mind, and all corrections and additions can be made through mental rapport. There will be nothing to indicate that the correction or addition is yours. In all the history of the Plan there has been no personalization. It is rather a creation of all of us together..."
(Read more about Isaac Asimov's Prime Radiant)
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