I worked at a game company for a while and one of the interesting things there was that there really wasn't a good way around checking in binaries to the repo. First off, a lot of your "source" assets are properly in binary form (images, for example), because that was the most compact form for them to exist, by orders of magnitude, and also because trying to generate them from some other non-binary representation would add tremendous overhead to development work. On top of that, building the entire product from "source" might involve tens to hundreds of thousands of hours of CPU/GPU time. So you just didn't do that. Instead you built everything in parallel and checked the results in somewhere, that would then get bundled together into the final product. There are ways around doing things this way, for sure, but given that you can just go pay a fairly insignificant amount of dollars to some company and get a VCS that won't choke.

> There is a reason why all the big tech companies operate this way. Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, all have one giant repository with their entire product.

Cool, but that doesn't explain why Office and Windows need to share the same repo. Ditto for gmail and chrome os. Ditto for fb messenger and whatever face recognition algorithm they use.

I see how my post could have led to that interpretation. That’s not what I meant. There are certainly many many repos in use across Microsoft, for all sorts of different projects. Office doesn’t share the same repo as Windows. And neither does the toolchain (compiler/linker/etc.); only the binaries are checked into the Windows repo. Those are truly separate products, which need to work across different versions of Windows.

Office and Windows don't share the same repo...