This article was published on September 17, 2015

Google’s codebase spans 2 billion lines: 40 times bigger than Windows


Ever wondered how much code it takes to run Google’s services? Rachel Potvin, an engineering manager at the company revealed at a recent @Scale conference that it’s in the neighborhood of 2 billion lines.

That’s roughly 40 times the size of Microsoft’s Windows XP OS and 100 times that of Facebook’s primary app. And it’s all stored in a single repository. Potvin guesses that it’s the largest code base on the planet.

Google has crafted its own version control system called Piper, to host its entire codebase and allow its 25,000 developers to contribute to it.

In addition, Potvin notes that the search giant is working with Facebook to release an open source version control tool, based on an existing favorite called Mercurial.

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Her talk has lots more interesting numbers to blow your mind and is well worth a watch.

The motivation for a monolithic codebase [YouTube via Wired]

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