r/BeAmazed • u/hollow_hideous_soul • 26d ago

Technology 51 million lines of code. Chromium codebase.

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u/tehonly1 26d ago

no wonder it lags like a mf

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u/GoldenShackles 25d ago

To canabalize one of my comments from a couple months ago:

From my perspective web developers optimize for development speed and convenience. I say that as a long-time C++/ Win32 developer who worked on products where we had to pack things tightly into structs to save a few bytes in a data structure. These days it feels like (and I'm exaggerating to make a point) devs just go... "Hmmm. I need an IsEvenNumber function so I'll just npm include a package that has a 100k JavaScript file every user will need to download." Multiply that by every person on the team thinking the same thing, and then add several hundred tracking cookies, telemetry, etc.

Chromium (and Safari, and Firefox) are actually extremely fast and efficient, and have likely had more effort and man hours devoted to tuning performance than almost any other software product ever made. (Operating systems might be the lone exception.)

There are some performance tradeoffs for security, such as the multi-process architecture, but even there things are optimized just about as much as humanly possible.

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u/runvnc 25d ago

I would argue that in many ways it is a type of operating system. Or at least, an overlay operating system.