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lmctfy
C++2013–2024
google / lmctfy · Archived

lmctfy

lmctfy is the open source version of Google’s container stack, which provides Linux application containers.

Systems & Infrastructure
Explore on GitHubRead Hacker News discussions
13Distinct people
14Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.4KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

lmctfy is the open source version of Google’s container stack, which provides Linux application containers.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year14 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2013-10-03 00:41:26 UTC to 2024-12-02 05:35:36 UTC.

0123452013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 5 mentions; 2 submissions, 3 comments20132014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 1 submissions, 0 comments2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 3 mentions; 0 submissions, 3 comments2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments20182019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments2024

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20132013-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC523
20142014-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20152015-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC110
20162016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20172017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC303
20182018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

14 sources
random3·Aug 2, 2017
Why should there be an assumption of (full) objectivity on an article written by one provider of the 3 technologies that are being compared? Whit that said the article is fairly balanced in presenting some layers of the whole context (mostly the historical one). Although I would mention Google tried to have their own Docker but that didn't pan out (https://github.com/google/lmctfy) so they switched to Docker and had Kubernetes open-sourced. More historical details would have just made for a longer (albeit more interesting) article I guess. Now to actual context. While they mention Swarm is not in CNCF and under tight control of Docker Inc. they don't mention that while Mesos is in ASF, Mesosphere hired the majority of the PMC (committers with voting rights). and the rest of the DC/OS is not even in ASF so doesn't even have to abide to th
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e rules of the ASF. At the same time, Mesosphere heavily used the Mesos brand by mixing Mesos-phere and DC/OS into everything Mesos. So the reason people talk about Mesos, Marathon, DC/OS and Mesosphere as almost synonyms is because they made it so. Marathon used to be a Mesos framework and service scheduler, now it's a DC/OS one for the most part (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13656193) However, in the process, they managed to alienate a part of the community too, all this while Kubernetes was able to do probably one of the best community jobs in OSS and skyrocketed (https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?q=mesos,kubernetes). That must be a bitter irony if you consider that initially Kubernetes was supposed to be just a Mesos framework... So yes, Mesos is lower level and with the two phase scheduling it should be more versatile, etc. but that value is highly diminished if you consider the focus is around DC/OS. I think there are several angles that make this whole context interesting. Perhaps it would be worth a full writing...
In Docker vs. Kubernetes vs. Mesos
Inufu·May 7, 2017
My main gripe with Rust so far has been the unnecessary profusion of Result<> types, making it hard to process and forward errors. Case in point: the example in the article from the rust documentation that converts errors to strings just to forward them: https://doc.rust-lang.org/book/error-handling.html#the-limit... In practice, I find a type like Google's util::StatusOr (https://github.com/google/lmctfy/blob/master/util/task/statu...) a lot easier to use (I've written >100kloc c++ using it). This uses a standardized set of error codes and a freeform string to indicate errors. I've yet to encounter a case where these ~15 codes were insufficient: https://github.com/google/lmctfy/blob/master/util/task/codes...
In My Struggles with Rust
lstamour·Aug 13, 2014
If they're important enough to be part of the language, somebody's going to use them... and common library functions will too. Exceptions aren't usually something you can boycott in a language ... and if you're going to have to use them, well, it's best to treat them as part of your program's logic, yes? Consider the many different errors Google handles and it's not always a dead failure... https://github.com/google/lmctfy/blob/master/util/task/codes... it's nice to be able to both return a value and an unambiguous exception state with automatic closure of resources (e.g. finally, or rewinding the stack...) such that you can safely retry without cleaning up after yourself. That's the goal here. Of course, Google's Go language avoids exceptions by using multiple return values, conventions and a defer statement... but then you can't easily
Read the rest
put all your error handling code in any one place, can you, without restructuring your code? To each language its conventions, I suppose.
In Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006 (2007) [pdf]
WestCoastJustin·Jun 9, 2014
Google has plenty of experience with containers already, since they heavily use cgroups and the concept of containers in their production environment for isolation and resource control, never mind the fact that two of their engineers had written much of the initial cgroups code. I talked about this in my "Introduction to Containers on Linux using LXC" screencast [1]. Briefly, Google is in the process of open sourcing their internal container code [2], there was a Wired article that talked about their container orchestration system [3], and finally, there was John Wilkes (Google Cluster Management), who talks about the container management system [4]. Docker adds very interesting filesystem ideas and software for the management of container images. Personally, I think we are on the cusp of a transition from VPS (xen/hvm) to VPS (containers
Read the rest
). I also hope that Google throws some of their concepts at the Docker project. Interesting times for this space. [1] http://sysadmincasts.com/episodes/24-introduction-to-contain... [2] https://github.com/google/lmctfy [3] http://www.wired.com/2013/03/google-borg-twitter-mesos/all/ [4] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ZFMlO98Jkc
In Google Embraces Docker, the Next Big Thing in Cloud Computing
jamesaguilar·Oct 3, 2013
One of the pieces of code that has a more general purpose: https://github.com/google/lmctfy/blob/master/util/task/codes... One thing I really like about working with Google software is that you can count on the same namespace of error codes being used pretty much everywhere. Generally speaking, the software I write and work with can't differentiate between errors finer than these. The machine readable errors are the ones you can respond to differently, and you put detailed messages in the status message. This is how it should be, according to this semi-humble engineer!
In Lmctfy: Google's Linux application container stack

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