alt Hacker NewsExactly because monorepos have least overhead when they’re small, monorepos generally win because you need to be small for a long while until you get big.
By the time you’re “at scale” (who knows), and all these monorepo at scale problems start to overwhelm, you can switch strategy, because the economy of polyrepos is so obvious by then.
So far, I’ve started a new job a handful of times by collapsing a premature polyrepo strategy: people were not experienced enough to merge two git repos without a common root.
I’ve only once went the other way, and it incurred so much overhead, it decreased developer productivity by some small but not insignificant percentage.
To be clear: I’m not a maximalist. All of my open-source work is exceedingly compartmentalised. My DNS library is separate from my external-dns webhook is separate from my fork of external-dns. They could all live in one repo. But FOSS encourages reusability, commercial software encourages clumping and vendoring.
> By the time you’re “at scale” (who knows), and all these monorepo at scale problems start to overwhelm, you can switch strategy, because the economy of polyrepos is so obvious by then.
Conversely to your experience, I have worked at a handful of places who have a monorepo that has been creaking under its own weight for years, but its structure as a monorepo now underpins the business, and so migration to a polyrepo simply never happens, and developers are now checking out a 50GB repo in its entirety periodically.