A History of IDEs at Google

The post earned 357 points by detailing forgotten tools like Pla圎dIt, which Google used from 2004 to 2008, and an internal Eclipse fork that cost $2 million to maintain. Ex-employees revealed that the Eclipse fork processed 50,000 builds daily, but was replaced by a browser-based IDE in 2010. The takeaway: even the world’s best-funded engineering org rebuilt its editor three times, with each iteration lasting 3–5 years, before settling on a hackable core. The data point that Google spent 12% of its engineering budget on tooling from 2005–2010 puts the scale in perspective. It’s a masterclass in the evolution of developer productivity tools.