Why Google Stores Billions of Lines of Code in a Single Repository (2016)
Maybe I&#x27;m not cool enough to understand this, but I don&#x27;t see the draw for monorepos. Imagine if you&#x27;re a tool owner, and you want to make a change that presents significant improvements for 99.9% of people, but causes significant problems for 0.1% of your users. In a versioned world, you can release your change as a new version, and allow your users to self-select if&#x2F;when&#x2F;how they want to migrate to the new version. But in a monorepo, you have to either trample over the 0.1%, or let the 0.1% hold everyone else hostage.<p>Conversely, imagine if you&#x27;re using some tools developed by a far off team within the company. Every time the tooling team decides to make a change, it will immediately and irrevocably propagate into your stack, whether you like it or not.<p>If you were at a startup and had a production critical project, would you hardcode specific versions for all your dependencies, and carefully test everything before moving to newer versions? Or would you just set everything to LATEST and hope that none of your dependencies decide to break you the next day? Working with a monorepo is essentially like the latter.