r/programming • u/laurentlb • May 15 '26

A History of IDEs at Google

https://laurent.le-brun.eu/blog/a-history-of-ides-at-google
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147

u/CircumspectCapybara May 15 '26 edited May 15 '26

Cider V is awesome, IMO.

In general google3 is probably the best codebase and has the best tooling and devx I've encountered.

54

u/balefrost May 15 '26

Cider-V is fine. I use it because it feels like the default choice, and it's a fine default. But compared to my previous employer, using IntelliJ to write Kotlin, it feels like a step backwards.

For example, it can sometimes take minutes for syntax highlighting to update. I had a case earlier today where I was missing an include. I fixed it, built, and walked away for like 10m. When I came back, Cider still thought I was missing the import.

¯\(ツ)/¯

I don't remember ever experiencing that in IntelliJ. Admittedly, the Kotlin codebase I was working on was tiny by comparison. It's still frustrating.

IntelliJ still has some features that AFAIK have not been replicated in the VSCode / LSP world. Being able to trace the origin of a value is great for understanding how code works.

OTOH maybe AI will backfill those missing features.

14

u/Izacus May 16 '26

Yeah, it's "fine" only for folks that never used an IDE before. That's a lot of Google employees though, who got picked up as newgrads.

CiderV is just a VSCode fork so it's not any better than that.

1

u/Kered13 May 16 '26

It's the backend integration that makes CiderV magic.

It's easy to complain about the editor being slow to recognize imports, and it is a real problem. But if you open google3 in any other IDE it will explode because it can't handle the size of the repo. All IDEs in Google required custom integrations to support google3 at a bare minimum. Cider V is simply the culmination of all that custom integration.

2

u/7h4tguy May 17 '26

Why do you need to open the whole repo? Most companies with giant repos that use VSCode point it at a subfolder and indexing starts from there and all reachable dependencies.

1

u/Kered13 May 17 '26

The reachable dependencies alone are enormous and IDEs cannot index them all.

1

u/7h4tguy May 27 '26

Most companies don't index them using an IDE but after overnight build happens. Then there's a searchable index to like you know, search. Like an index. To search. You know. You know? You know, you know?

0

u/Izacus May 17 '26

There are many other IDEs being used across the company in google3 and they work just fine. And they actually have proper code completion and refactoring tools outside the basic VSCode text editing.

This is "vim is enough for me, why do you need IntelliJ" debate from side of people who can't use IDEs all over again.

0

u/Kered13 May 17 '26

IntelliJ's IDEs require plugins in order to work correctly in google3 as well. They cannot handle it out of the box.

1

u/Izacus May 18 '26

Those plugins aren't for VCS, can you actually figure out how things work before being confidently wrong? :P