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Comment by sgammon

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

[2]: https://mvnrepository.com/repos/central

parent sgammon 1 month ago

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