Google's IDE Evolution: From Fragmentation to Cloud-Based Cider
Original: A History of IDEs at Google
Why This Matters
Demonstrates how large-scale development challenges drive IDE innovation and cloud-based solutions
A Google engineer documents the company's IDE history from 2011-2024, revealing how Google evolved from supporting multiple developer-chosen IDEs to developing Cider, a popular cloud-based web editor that gained traction through features like one-click pull requests and language server protocol support.
From 2011-2024, Google allowed engineers to choose their own IDEs, creating significant fragmentation. Senior engineers including Jeff Dean initially believed forcing IDE uniformity would cause unhappiness. Despite this philosophy, Google had to reimplement useful integrations like Bazel support and Starlark tooling across multiple IDEs. Around 2013, Google developed Cider, a web-based Cloud IDE that unexpectedly became popular. Initially used by technical writers for markdown editing, Cider offered efficient workflows including one-click pull requests with auto-merge options. The turning point came when the team added code completion through language-server protocol. Unlike traditional IDEs that assumed local source code and indexing, Cider addressed Google's monorepo scale challenges by operating as a lightweight client with backend processing.