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It’s really hard for me to read this entire post without a nagging dismissive thought in the back of my mind: “They did all of this for a CRUD app?!” I’ve work

It’s really hard for me to read this entire post without a nagging dismissive thought in the back of my mind: “They did all of this for a CRUD app?!” I’ve worked on some huge code bases for some very complicated iOS apps, but nothing that comes close to amount of engineering involved here. I wish they went into more depth of what exactly motivated these engineering design decisions so I could understand the problem space. It reads like they had some threading issues in core data, and solved it by completely rearchitecting a new UI framework? Really? Apple seems capable of shipping products using the existing public SDK for the last 15 years, so whats fundamentally different here? I can’t help but wonder if this was all the result of massive over-engineering.

deleted 4y ago
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pixel_tracing 4y ago
Yea I lol’d hard, it’s like some great massive achievement and then you go work at Google and Apple and realize there’s actual systems engineering under the hood (kernel, process scheduling, daemons, etc.)
saurik 4y ago
> Apple seems capable of shipping products using the existing public SDK for the last 15 years... ? Apple definitely isn't using "the existing public SDK" to build their apps, and absolutely has not been doing so for 15 years: they didn't even adopt their own UIViewController abstractions until like iOS 4 or so, and usage of classes like UIScroller (not UIScrollView) UITable (not UITableView) and UIDocumentView (not UIWebView) continued for a long time while they tried to make the public versions of the API acceptable enough for real apps.
- fingerlocks 4y ago
  Of course I was being flippant, and I think you know that.
  - sokoloff 4y ago
    That did not at all come through to this reader.
School-Cotton 4y ago
FBiOS is almost certainly the biggest and most complicated mobile app in the world (edit: perhaps outside of Asia, whose mobile app landscape I’m not familiar with). There is a truly dizzying amount of features, different types of news feed stories with different behavior, etc. Everything described in this article (or at least the parts I have direct knowledge of, which is a sizable chunk of it) was essential to force the thing to continue working at all. It’s not over-engineering, it’s over-producting: Facebook (err… sorry, “Meta”) is politically and culturally incapable of cutting bloat, making engineering solutions like these necessary.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

pixel_tracing 4y ago

Yea I lol’d hard, it’s like some great massive achievement and then you go work at Google and Apple and realize there’s actual systems engineering under the hood (kernel, process scheduling, daemons, etc.)

saurik 4y ago

> Apple seems capable of shipping products using the existing public SDK for the last 15 years... ? Apple definitely isn't using "the existing public SDK" to build their apps, and absolutely has not been doing so for 15 years: they didn't even adopt their own UIViewController abstractions until like iOS 4 or so, and usage of classes like UIScroller (not UIScrollView) UITable (not UITableView) and UIDocumentView (not UIWebView) continued for a long time while they tried to make the public versions of the API acceptable enough for real apps.

fingerlocks 4y ago
Of course I was being flippant, and I think you know that.
- sokoloff 4y ago
  That did not at all come through to this reader.

School-Cotton 4y ago

FBiOS is almost certainly the biggest and most complicated mobile app in the world (edit: perhaps outside of Asia, whose mobile app landscape I’m not familiar with). There is a truly dizzying amount of features, different types of news feed stories with different behavior, etc. Everything described in this article (or at least the parts I have direct knowledge of, which is a sizable chunk of it) was essential to force the thing to continue working at all. It’s not over-engineering, it’s over-producting: Facebook (err… sorry, “Meta”) is politically and culturally incapable of cutting bloat, making engineering solutions like these necessary.