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This may sound like an insane number. But as a Chrome developer, the number of flags was never an issue for me. You don't need to test every permutation of flag

This may sound like an insane number. But as a Chrome developer, the number of flags was never an issue for me. You don't need to test every permutation of flags because almost all of them are unsupported, best-effort kinds of things with a very small scope. You only need to test the default configuration. Compared to the other sources of complexity in Chrome (primarily portability, sandboxing, backwards compatibility, and the sheer scope of the provided APIs), flags are nothing.

summerlight 4y ago
This is right, in many cases flags are supposed to control specific launches ("flag-flip") or being a developer shortcut rather than giving users meaningful choices.
- medellin 4y ago
  Sounds like they forgot to cleanup after themselves
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - gipp 4y ago
    It's largely an artifact of trunk-driven development. Everything is behind a feature flag. The benefits of this approach vastly outweigh the drawbacks IMO, but one of those drawbacks is that you tend to end up with large numbers of dead codepaths behind forgotten flags, because cleaning up old flags becomes a multi-stage process, with no incentive to follow through but your team's "standard" processes (that probably nobody's checking on) and your own desire to keep things tidy.
  - summerlight 4y ago
    Or there might be hundreds of on-going genuine launches/experiments. There are literally thousands of engineers in the Chrome org and each launch usually takes several quarters thanks to the nature of being a customer facing platform.