alt Hacker News> a team dedicated to the IntelliJ integration was formed around 2015
I don't know which team that was, but to add to that, official support for IntelliJ at Google started quite a bit earlier. I was the second person to join a team writing IntelliJ plugins. We wrote a Blaze plugin not too long after Blaze launched, as it was becoming more popular.
Google tells me that Blaze launched in 2006, so I think it must have been 2007 or 2008.
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Nice to see you Brian!
Blaze was started late 2005 or early 2006. Eclipse+IntelliJ was also at that time.
The IntelliJ blaze plugin was already started and out when I joined in 2007. My first job was to keep it from being rewritten yet another time, get teams to use it, and also keep it from being cancelled.
I'm not sure about the dates. At some point (2014?), the use of IntelliJ was discouraged in favor of Eclipse. One year later or so, the decision was reversed and the effort focused on IntelliJ (and Eclipse were considered deprecated).
Yes, there were over time, multiple teams working on intellij plugins to support google3 before it all got relatively merged.
You are talking, i believe, about the support for blaze builds in intellij, which was fairly early on, as you point out.
I suspect Laurent is remembering some of the google3 mobile/android efforts, which were much later.
This is just on the "java" side, too. There were other plugins being built that were fairly specific to google3 support.