The first sentence is literally not true, and easy to see just from looking at changes in who contributes over time. The number of contributors is not even the

The first sentence is literally not true, and easy to see just from looking at changes in who contributes over time. The number of contributors is not even the same order of magnitude from when it started. Chrome was released 14 years ago, and they started writing it even earlier than that, so even trivial "passage of time" would tell you it was unlikely to be true - most developers are not working on the same codebase or even at the same company, they did 14 years ago. This was much more common in tech decades ago , but not anymore, and not been true for a long time. So even if it was "bad old code" (which, i'll explain, is also nonsense), the same people aren't writing it. As for "bad old code" - Chrome was faster, safer, less janky, etc, than its contemporaries for many many years since inception. So when you say "Coding in Google-dialect C++ was a spectacularly bad choice, evident even then", it just makes you look silly - it clearly was not. If it was such a bad choice, evident even then, the former would not have happened. Overall - to look at clear success and basically say "they totally fucked everything up, and i wouldn't have done it, because i know better", is pretty arrogant. To then think that if there are bad design decisions, the main bad ones from decades ago are the programming language, is honestly the most hilariously arrogant thing i've read on HN in a while. So congrats?