alt Hacker NewsVery little development in Google3 happens locally. You aren't even allowed to keep the source code on your local disk, and this is true no matter what OS it runs. (Android and Chromium are different though.)
You have access to an extremely powerful remote workstation that from a UI perspective functions almost identically to a local workstation, via Chrome Remote Desktop. Plus, no one builds things locally, even on that machine. There is a huge, absolutely amazing distributed build system that everyone uses for everything. (Again, Android and Chromium are different.)
So you don't really need a powerful local machine. I held out for a long time--there were a lot of growing pains in the early days. But eventually it got really, really good.
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I can understand Android (including the Linux kernel) being "too big" and "too separate" to go into Google3, but why Chromium? When it was forked from KHTML/WebKit it was probably not that big compared to the rest of Google's codebase.
> You aren't even allowed to keep the source code on your local disk
How is this enforced?
Could you even put all of google3 on local disk if it were allowed?!? You'd need quite a RAID array. I suspect it'd be almost impossible in practice.