Larry McVoy Advocates Arch

Admittedly, that’s not what he’s trying to do when he says:

People mumble about arch until they go use it for a while and realize it is about 3-5 years behind BK.

Here’s what he was saying about BitKeeper four years ago, in 1999:

The problem with most systems is that they don’t scale. They all work great for 1-5 developers. It doesn’t matter which one you choose. However, they all tend to fall apart when you have 1000 developers. Since we have experience in source management, having designed and implemented most of Sun’s TeamWare source management system, we are quite familiar with the scaling problem and feel that we can provide a better, more scalable and more reliable answer. We did it before, and this one is better.

Without taking away from anything Larry was meaning to say, that still seems like pretty high praise for arch, to me.

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