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dmoy07/31/20251 replyview on HN

We used gvisor in Kythe (semantic indexer for the monorepo). Like for the guts of running it on borg, not the open source indexers part.

For indexing most languages, we didn't need it, because they were pretty well supported on borg stack with all the Google internals. But Kythe indexes 45 different languages, and so inevitably we ran into problems with some of them. I think it was the newer python indexer?

> really was mainly for GCP/GKE

I mean... I don't know. That could also be true. There's a whole giant pile of internal software at Google that starts out as "built for <XYZ>, but then it gets traction and starts being used in a ton of other unrelated places. It's part of the glory of the monorepo - visibility into tooling is good, and reusability is pretty easy (and performant), because everyone is on the same build system, etc.


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mikepurvis07/31/2025

Dang, 45? I mean, I assume that's C++, Go, Python, Java, and JavaScript/TypeScript. And languages for build scripts, plus stuff like md and rst. And some shells. Probably embedded languages like lua, sql, graphql, and maybe some shading languages. Fortran and some assembly languages, a forth or two for low level bringup or firmware. Dart of course.

But all of those is still less than 30. What am I missing?

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