Netscape 6.0 is finally going into its first public beta. There never was a version 5.0. The last major release, version 4.0, was released almost three years ago. Three years is an awfully long tim…
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.
If Google were to start over, all of that would be thrown out. It just can’t be done.
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.
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.
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.
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.