# Abseil packaged Google's cleaned-up C++ idioms

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/abseil-packaged-googles-cleaned-up-c-idioms/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Titus Winters](https://realalpha.app/people/titus-winters/) · Titus Winters is a Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe. · Built Google’s Abseil C++ libraries, led its readability program, and co-authored Software Engineering at Google.
- Host: [Gergely Orosz](https://realalpha.app/people/gergely-orosz/) · Host, The Pragmatic Engineer · Spent four years at Uber heading mobile, web and backend teams; shipped part of its payments system.
- Show: The Pragmatic Engineer
- Episode: [Software engineering at Google & CS education with Titus Winters](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/), Oct 28, 2026
- Moment: 22:04 to 26:09 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/abseil-packaged-googles-cleaned-up-c-idioms/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/?t=1324

## Quote

> “And Abseil was basically, here is the layer of **common C++ idiom**. This is the vernacular that everything at Google is written out of.”
> — [Titus Winters](https://realalpha.app/people/titus-winters/) at [22:21](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/?t=1341) · The Pragmatic Engineer

## Takeaways

1. Abseil was the public projection of cleaned-up internal components.
2. Google had 200–250 million first-party C++ lines at the time.
3. About 10–12 engineers worked full-time on the refactoring.

## About this segment

Google opened a cleaned-up version of its common C++ idioms as Abseil. A 10–12-person team did the work against a 200–250-million-line codebase.

From “Software engineering at Google & CS education with Titus Winters”, Oct 28, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/)

## Transcript

From the transcript The Pragmatic Engineer publishes with the episode.

[22:17](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/?t=1337) That became not the hottest topic, and they kind of dropped that idea after a year or two. But... The low level components, like if you wanted to share these things that were written internally in the monorepo, what would it take to do that effectively? And Abseil was basically, here is the layer of common C++ idiom. This is the vernacular that everything at Google is written out of. Let's open source that so that there's a common substrate for all Google tech.

[22:50](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/?t=1370) At the same time, the question was, some of this vernacular is gross and tech daddy. Should we clean that up before we commit to it forever? And the answer was yes, to their great credit. So the Abseil open source project is the public like projection of the stuff that got cleaned up. Most of the work was that was I would defend pretty strongly. That was probably the largest refactoring task in human history.

[23:17](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/?t=1397) No way. Yeah, we had like 10 or 12 people working full-time with world-class tools that no one else understands yet, just cleaning up and making sure that idiomatic code externally would be compatible with idiomatic code internally. And obviously,

[23:35](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/?t=1415) when you were talking about cleaning up, you're talking about cleaning up utilities and components that are in the middle of some of the highest used services in the world. Google Search, Gmail, Maps, you name it. If you would break something, you would

[23:49](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/?t=1429) probably see at some point an outage in one of those services. It was at the time, I think it was 200 or 250 million lines of C++ code with 250 million lines of C++? First party, not counting external dependencies. And Google had that kind of, I think that was the public number at the time, 10,000 engineers probably at the time, making edits to that code base in a month. And so our job was, we joked about, that's a New York reference.

[24:19](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/?t=1459) We joked about it as our job is the logical equivalent of Google has a new technology for the skyscraper foundations. We're replacing the foundation under the Empire State Building. We're not allowed to close the building or block traffic. And we discovered nuclear waste in the basement. It's okay, guys, we got this. Like it was, it was a magically, it was a great team.

[24:40](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/?t=1480) I just want to put the 250 million lines of code in perspective because today with AI, AI can generate like, you know, we have crazy numbers. It can generate tens of thousands of lines of code in an hour, et cetera. And you can get to millions if you want to. Honestly, just an agent can do it. However, pre-AI, Uber's mobile application was about a million lines of code on iOS and on Android, and that was each written by 200 engineers for years.

[25:06](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/?t=1506) Bunn, I find it rare to find examples of a project that has more than pre-AI, more than let's say 3 million lines of code. And that will typically be hundreds of engineers writing it for several years. So the reason I was like 250 million, that is about 100 times more than I've heard for code base. And we're talking about like, clearly, this is written for production. You're not like just goofing around and pushing some scaffolding here and there and right.

[25:43](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/?t=1543) And when you said first party, it's easy to have a lot of code when you take on an open source component. But no, no. Nope. That was all Googler authored. Yep.

[25:53](https://realalpha.app/v/mQu0zN4IvSI/?t=1553) And so we have some insight into how things grow.