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Since I was at Google 12 years, this doesn't surprise me at all. It's not that there are 1,400 flags in ONE module; it's that all the many systems it includes a

Since I was at Google 12 years, this doesn't surprise me at all. It's not that there are 1,400 flags in ONE module; it's that all the many systems it includes all have their own. No one looks over that list and says, "Hmm, which of these 1,400 do I need today?" There's absolutely no reward for scouring the system and getting rid of the 90% of the flags that serve no purpose anymore. All you would do is annoy people and risk breaking something. So no one does it. In fact, as I recall, you could either "list the flags" for a system, or "list all the flags AND all the included systems' flags." Hardly anyone wants to do the latter.

omoikane 4y ago
There is some incentive to clean up flags since there has been horror stories about dead flags causing problems[1]. I seem to recall there is some automation that proposes changes to remove flags that has not been set to non-default values for a sufficiently long time, but maybe that's not done for binaries that run outside of Google's network. [1] Knight Capital's $440 million glitch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31239033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31239033 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4329101 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4329101
- vlovich123 4y ago
  That doesn’t really apply to software like Chrome modulo backup / restore accidentally confused but the risk of that depends on how that’s implemented (feels unlikely).
amazon_illegal 4y ago
[dead]