5 ms·

We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good. It is easy to forget that this was not the case for the vast majority of time that

We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good. It is easy to forget that this was not the case for the vast majority of time that computers have existed. Chrome’s original design definitely predates our current rich ecosystem. Plus, V8 and Chrome’s performance profile are demanding enough that there would be a pretty high bar for those dependencies anyway.

bcjdjsndon 6d ago
> We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good. Specifically what are you talking about here? Chrome is c++ I thought?
- sgammon 4d ago
  Chrome was invented in 2008. Abseil[1] didn't exist publicly until 2017, derived partly from Chromium. HarfBuzz wasn't ported to C++ until 2010. I don't know the entire constellation of libs Chrome would use if it was designed in C++ today, but I bet a lot of them didn't exist before Chrome or were even created partly as a downstream byproduct of Chromium. In other ecosystems: if Chrome were designed in Rust in 2008, there would be no crates.io to pull from. There would be no NPM, since Node followed V8/Chrome's invention in 2009. Maven Central had ~50K packages in 2009[2], which was a lot back then. In 2026, Maven Central hosts over 3 million. [1]: https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp https://github.com/abseil/abseil-cpp [2]: https://mvnrepository.com/repos/central https://mvnrepository.com/repos/central