“ EA’s Secret Weapon: Packages and Modules”
summary
EA has run a packages system for 14+ years that behaves like Ruby Gems or Rust cargo, hosting thousands of packages so a package download pulls all dependencies and builds; games average ~10M lines and the company has ~200M LOC. Packages use public/private headers, initially encode versions in paths then move to a single masterconfig (a one-line package→version map) which reduces upgrades. A private package server handles low-level leaf libs. Experimental C++ modules (Visual Studio 2017, search paths vs references) speed builds but lack stable dependency-generation, struggle with circular linkage and name collisions, and aren’t yet viable across EA’s many platforms.
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chapters (6)
- 0:00Introduction and background
- 4:13Problem of packages at EA
- 10:16EA’s package solution
- 29:28Package servers and divergence
- 34:47Introduction to modules
- 43:24Q&A session
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