Joel on Software

2001/08/31

And You Thought You Had Source Control Problems

Ray Ozzie sent me a link to a presentation given by Mark Lucovsky, a developer at Microsoft, about the Windows NT development process.

29 million lines of code. Source code takes up 50 gigabytes. Build takes 8 hours on a 4 CPU machine. 1000 machines in the "stress test" farm.

No, they don't use SourceSafe.  But I don't think CVS could handle it, either.

Have you been wondering about Distributed Version Control? It has been a huge productivity boon for us, so I wrote Hg Init, a Mercurial tutorial—check it out!

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You’re reading Joel on Software, stuffed with years and years of completely raving mad articles about software development, managing software teams, designing user interfaces, running successful software companies, and rubber duckies.

About the author.

I’m Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Fog Creek Software, a New York company that proves that you can treat programmers well and still be highly profitable. Programmers get private offices, free lunch, and work 40 hours a week. Customers only pay for software if they’re delighted. We make Trello, which lets you organize anything, together, FogBugz, enlightened issue tracking software for bug tracking, and Kiln, which provides distributed version control and code reviews. I’m also the co-founder and CEO of Stack Exchange. More about me.