That type of tooling can be replicated. That's why every Xoogler tries so hard to get Bazel adopted on everything they touch. Sometimes that's appropriate, sometimes it's not, but that's why.
Bazel isn't the whole of everything though, the other piece being exported is kubernetes, which isn't Google's borg, but that's its roots. There's Apache Airflow if you need a workflow engine like Sisyphus, no shortage of databases to choose from, though now we're drifting into the operations side of things.
But basically, Google has invested untold millions of dollars in the form of SWE and other engineering hours into making Google3 operate. If anyone else invested that kind of dough, with enough smarts, they'd also be able to make it a good experience. The problem is few people have that kind of budget, and even fewer invest in that thing, preferring to use free tools instead.
What tool do you use to edit code, and how much did your employer spend on that for you?
> That's why every Xoogler tries so hard to get Bazel adopted on everything they touch.
After burning an entire weekend like five years back trying to get a released version of tensorflow to build from source [0], I'm catastrophically disinclined to use Bazel for anything.
I found its diagnostics to be utterly unhelpful, its documentation to say nearly nothing I needed to know, and the various Internet resources for the build system to be somewhere between "as confused and lost as I was" and "total fanboy who is so expert in the system that they are incapable of speaking like anything other than an architecture astronaut".
I'm sure it's legitimately fuckin amazing when you learn it at a company that's big enough to have one or more entire teams dedicated to internal developer tooling (and training for and documentation of the same), but (at least in my experience) for those of us on the outside, it's just bad, bad, bad.
[0] The fucking thing wouldn't even build in the officially-supplied "build tensorflow" Docker image. I was utterly unable to find out why. I get that this indicates that the tensorflow folks fucked up somehow, but the fact that I was utterly unable to figure out how to understand WHAT they fucked up is pretty damning.
I drove the adoption of Bazel for my C++ project, which certainly does not have an entire team (nor even an entire person) dedicated to maintaining the build system.
We’re having incredible build performance with it, and I find its language much more readable than CMake or Make. We’re also using Bazel for things like packaging.
I spent two entire days attempting to understand (let alone correct) whatever was going wrong with the Tensorflow build.
The error messages were inscrutable, as was the debug output. There was a fair bit of official documentation, but little of it was "unhappy path" documentation, and what there was was unhelpful. As far as I could tell (and it was difficult to tell given how I was generally unable to understand the problem), none of the folks talking about this tool on the Greater Internet had ever run into this problem. [0]
I've never run into this problem with CMake, SCons, Make, or any of a dozen or two other build systems I've worked with. To put it another way, I've NEVER had a single problem with a build system be utterly impossible to understand and solve inside of a working day. (Sure, I've had to spend multiple working days solving multiple problems to get a build right, but I've never had any one problem prove to be utterly unsolvable in one day, let alone two.)
How easy it is to get into failure modes and (more crucially) how much support the system and supporting documentation gives you for both identifying the failure mode you're in and getting out of it are much, much more important than being the fastest thing out there. [1][2]
Unless I'm getting paid to use it and am required to use it and nothing else, Bazel is absolutely not worth my time.
[0] This must obviously be not the case. Given the circumstances, whatever I was running into, it's certain that TONS of people must have run into it. But it's telling that I couldn't discover any other people who were running into this.
[1] Yes, I'm sure that you've never had a significant problem with the tool. There are many, many useful tools out there that folks rave about that have burned me and burned the folks I work with badly enough that we won't touch them, ever.
[2] Also, if you learned to use Bazel inside the Googleplex, then that absolutely is a scenario covered by my statement: "I'm sure it's legitimately fuckin amazing when you learn it at a company that's big enough to have one or more entire teams dedicated to internal developer tooling..."
It does! Working like Google is like that but having had decades to build that dream, using the resources that only a megacorp could bring to bear in the problem, and in a monorepo. The fact that it's a monorepo is not to be dismissed. git doesn't work for monorepos.
Codespaces is like CitC; I haven't been a Google since the rise of AI so I can't comment on how the internal equivalent to Copilot is; Actions is very primitive compared to what Google has, but yeah, you can see where it's going. it doesn't compare right now but it could, eventually.
The Gemini-powered copilot is fine, but has so far, for me, only done automated like "heres a simple method based on the comment you wrote", or "I patched in a change to the other callsites when you renamed this thing". I have also not used it in 2 months so it's probably better already.
I still mainly do my LLM assisted coding in chat-style interfaces that are more like pair programming by mail.
I think the Gemini code assist is coming out as a consumer product, I forgot the name, because Google is awful at branding.
Bazel isn't the whole of everything though, the other piece being exported is kubernetes, which isn't Google's borg, but that's its roots. There's Apache Airflow if you need a workflow engine like Sisyphus, no shortage of databases to choose from, though now we're drifting into the operations side of things.
But basically, Google has invested untold millions of dollars in the form of SWE and other engineering hours into making Google3 operate. If anyone else invested that kind of dough, with enough smarts, they'd also be able to make it a good experience. The problem is few people have that kind of budget, and even fewer invest in that thing, preferring to use free tools instead.
What tool do you use to edit code, and how much did your employer spend on that for you?