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Why Facebook does not use Git – and why most other devs do • DEVCLASS (devclass.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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  • Facebook does not use Git due to scale issues with their large monorepo, instead opting for Mercurial.
  • Mercurial may be a better option for large monorepos, but Git has made improvements to support them better.
  • Despite some drawbacks, Git usage remains dominant with 93.87% share, due to familiarity, additional tools, and industry trends.
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[–] 91 points 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) (19 children)

Facebook uses Mercurial, but when people praise their developer tooling it's not just that. They're using their CLI which is built on top of Mercurial but cleans up its errors and commands further, it's all running on their own virtual filesystem (EdenFS), their dev testing in a customized version of chromium, and they sync code using their own in-house equivalent of GitHub, and all of it connects super nicely into their own customized version of VS Codium.

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  • [–] 26 points 2 years ago (6 children)

    Damn that sounds sick

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  • [–] 49 points 2 years ago

    The source control was so smooth and pleasant that it convinced me that git isn't the be all end all, and the general developer focus was super nice, but some of that tooling was pretty janky, poorly documented, and you had no stack overflow to fall back on. And some of it (like EdenFS), really felt like it was the duct tape holding that overloaded monorepo together (complete with all the jankiness of a duct tape solution).

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  • [–] 42 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    What you can do with 84000 employees

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  • [–] 19 points 2 years ago

    And some good management. Probably not a common opinion around here, but my company is not a tenth of that size, with a hundredth the number of devs, yet different teams still end up copy pasting libraries. Because it's faster than convincing management DevOps is important.

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  • [–] 15 points 2 years ago (2 children)

    And kinda horrifying. If something goes wrong, no Google, it's straight to IT

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  • [–] 24 points 2 years ago (9 children)

    The inhouse tooling from the massive tech companies is very cool but I always wonder how that impacts transferrable skills. I work in a much smaller shop but intentionally make tech decisions that will give our engineers a highly transferrable skill set. If someone wants to leave it should be easy to bring their knowledge to bear elsewhere.

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  • [–] 13 points 2 years ago (1 child)

    Speaking from my own experience and a few other seniors I work with, you try to recreate solutions you like at those smaller shops. It may not be identical, but you know what's possible.

    I came into a company that didn't have a system to manage errors. At my old job, errors would get grouped automatically and work can be prioritized through the groupings. The new company only handled errors when they saw it, by word of mouth.

    Immediately went to work setting up a similar system.

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  • [+] 3 points 2 years ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (3 children)

    Made easier to use like in when their codebase was leaked and no one had successfully built a game from it?

    in-house tools often encourage making a mess heavily reliant on those tools or working around their limitations, in my experience

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  • [–] 2 points 2 years ago

    Oh, it impacts indeed. And I would expect that to be partially to keep the devs from hopping away, as they will have a hard time transferring

    On the other hand, onboarding is longer and wastes more time and money of the company ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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