Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

None of us know what the google home page is actually doing. It reminds me of the gnu coreutils where the program "true" which simply returns a successful status code on run, is hundreds of lines in C. I could do that in 3 lines! Except I'd be ignoring all of the weird use cases and architectures that the coreutils have to support.

The google homepage works on a _remarkable_ number of devices. You could install a fresh copy of windows XP and the built in IE works flawlessly with google while almost any other page is broken.

And also forgetting all the analytics they need. I know its a dirty word on HN but this kind of stuff is essential for a product of this scale. Throw in some extras for accessibility, etc.




> gnu coreutils where the program "true" which simply returns a successful status code on run, is hundreds of lines in C

Looking at [0] it seems to be 80 lines, as it's doing argument-parsing (for --help and --version) and stream-management.

[0] https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true....


If I remember correctly GNU true violates various specs because it does too much (help and version) when it should ignore all parameters. As you say a valid implementation can be done in three lines.


The code is made way more complex by combining both true and false in to the same binary and then using the output binary name to decide which return code it outputs.

It seems overly complex to me but I have no idea what kind of requirements they have.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: