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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Because I previously worked on the Chromium codebase at Google I have a 'specialist' dev workstation, an HP Z840 dual 18 core Xeon with 256GB of RAM. And that's a model from many years ago now, the newer specialist workstations are even heftier. To work on chrome @ Google you absolutely need one.

That said, if you're using cached builds via goma and have a nice fat pipe it can go quite fast without making your machine sweat much.

It's an absolutely massive code base. I wish I could explain why, but it is. No single part sticks out as bloat to me. I could never get CLion (among other tools) to index it properly.

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Maybe someone can create a Goma-equivalent for ungoogled chromium, but it's the project's explicit goal to not depend on Google stuff (they actually apply hundreds of patches to the code to remove built-in google service references) so a Google-supplied Goma cache won't be of much use to this project's builds.

These days I work on a team at Google that provides distributed build infrastructure for non-Google3 projects, including goma. But unfortunately it's not available to the outside world, despite being built with that in mind.

How long does it take to build Chromium with a machine like that?

I was building Chromecast most often, not Chromium itself. So can't really recall. For Chromecast, from clean, it was around 10 minutes.

That sounded pretty reasonable until I realized you were talking about that beast of a workstation that can easily be between $25,000-80,000.

Pfft.... 10 minutes to compile, no sweat, not even enough time to brew and drink a tea/coffee.

According to https://zworkstations.com/products/z840/ it would be around 8k.

Not 5 years ago when it was first provisioned for me.

On the bottom row to the left of the price when viewed with desktop resolution: Condition: Refurbished

That's $8,000 for a refurbished computer with a processor that was launched in 2013.

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