54
Things You Should Never Do, Part I (2000)
(www.joelonsoftware.com)
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this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2024
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Programming
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You think web browsers should not exist? How do you write Google Chrome, and all of it's dependencies, in one page of code?
I think you're miss-understanding the article. Joel didn't say you should never rewrite an individual component in your code, he was saying you should never throw out an entire project (all of the components) and start from scratch.
He also wasn't talking about "multiple people and man-years of work". He was talking much larger projects. How many people have contributed Chrome? Not just direct contributions writing lines of code, but indirect contributions such as reporting bugs or writing documentation on how it works?
If Google were to start over, all of that would be thrown out. It just can't be done.
All you can really do is what Microsoft did with IE / Edge. Edge was a fork of Chromium which was a fork of WebKit which was a fork of KTHML which was a fork of the KDE HTML Widget. Which dates back to 1996. Internet Explorer started in 1995. Microsoft didn't start Edge from scratch, they basically shifted their team of developers over to another project that was the same age.
The smaller the project, the easier it is to do a full rewrite but realistically it's almost never a good idea unless your product is very young.
To stress the importance of this very basic fact, people need to understand that even Google, a company with virtually limitless resources to rearchitect and rewrite any and all type of software project, made the call to avoid using major features offered by some programming languages, such as C++'s exceptions, because it could have unintended consequences on the company's legacy code base which they could not rewrite.
And here we are, reading fantastic claims over how complete rewrites are reasonable things while flipping compiler flags to harden legacy projects is unheard of.
They actually did somewhat start Edge from scratch originally. They made EdgeHTML as a rewrite of the IE 11 trident engine.
In the end they abandoned it and moved over to chromium. One of the reasons being Google intentionally breaking their sites for EdgeHTML.
Yes. Multiple historical layers, each giving the creators way too much power over presentation, while they are still supposed to handle stuff like accessibility themselves, making a company webpage a thousand manhours project. Browsers being monoliths is only one page of the book.
So we agree that browsers are way too complex?
This is reaching a level of idiocy that's completely unheard of.
Just say you know nothing about what you're saying and you're completely oblivious, and sit out the rest of the discussion.
Please refrain from using personal insults in this community. You're free to express your opinion, but personal insults does nothing but make the community more toxic. c/programming is a gathering ground for both inexperienced and experienced programmers, so this level of lashing out is uncalled for.