12th April 2017 by Paul Ducklin
These days, programmers often work in large, collaborative teams that produce dozens of different deliverables at the same time.
If you’re working on an image editor, for example, some of the components in it might also be released as standalone programming libraries that other people can use.
You might have a GUI version of your product, as well as command line tools that do the same sort of work in a different way.
And you might publish for several different platforms, including mobile devices, each of which needs its own build of each version.
For example, imagine that you’re part of an team that makes image editing software, and that you’re working on a low level function called multiply_brightness_matrix(), trying to make it run faster.
The code you’re looking at might be no more than 100 lines of code in one file, out of 10,000,000 lines in 10,000 files in the whole project.
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