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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Creating a new Python runtime in Go is obviously non-trivial, but so is rewriting the heart of YouTube in Go. Heck, YouTube may be a bigger codebase than Python for all I know.

And there's a lot more side benefit in a better multithreading Python runtime for Google for other Python code Google has (or hosts), whereas the benefits of a YouTube rewrite are more narrowly limited to YouTube.

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Just because the site is popular doesn't mean the codebase is big. It's a simple site. I could probably write YouTube in Go in an afternoon and I don't even know Go.

You could perhaps write a feature-bare clone. Here's some basic features:

    - search (the various search pages)
    - trending
    - channels
    - subscription
    - video uploads
    - history
    - comments
    - likes
    - upload
    - video editing (most of this is in browser, but still)
    - livestream
    - video analytics
    - payment and ad management
    - video comment review and moderation
    - translation
    - captioning
    - video replication, multiscaling, caching, and resolution management based on network speed
    - video recommendation
    - cards, overlays, annotations, etc.
    - music and sound effect search
    - antispam
    - dmca and copyright tooling

And that was 5 minutes of poking around.

> resolution management based on network speed

Not so much a feature of YouTube as it is a feature of HLS/Dash... but yes, it means you've gotta transcode the source video into multiple different bitrates.

Even outside of that, I can override the bitrate in some instances. But yeah, I was mainly talking about the necessary replication, cache, and transcoding (and I actually forgot about the multiple codecs, which they also provide, in addition to multiple resolutions/bitrates)

This comment made me wonder what you consider to be a complex site.

Not a video host with comments. That's practically CRUD. A very solved problem.

But, really, what site cannot be boiled down to practically CRUD? That does not help us understand what you believe is a complex site.

Is this supposed to be some kind of no true Scotsman?

Well, go on then, why spend just an afternoon when you could spend 5 whole days. Make a YouTube that's 10x better, host it from your closet and watch the megabucks roll in as you take down Google.

See "Code: It's Trivial" https://blog.codinghorror.com/code-its-trivial/

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