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Comment by forgetfulness | Hacker News Reader

This —nearly 10%— is a lot for a one of the oldest and biggest publicly available C++ codebases.

(First real public commit in gecko-dev is the historic open sourcing of the engine in 1998!)

https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/3b56a9af51519d2e...

Wow, that is some old farty code! "Free the lizard" indeed, many are we who are happy that it happened! So thank you Mozilla.

Has anyone tried to build that commit in modern days? Would be interesting to see how it runs and how little the existing web would work with it. Maybe HN would load, but most other sites wouldn't. Since TLS wasn't defined until 1999, I'm guessing you would have to run a HTTPS->HTTP proxy first, as HTTPS wouldn't work.

> Has anyone tried to build that commit in modern days?

I was almost tempted to try, but I think I'd rather sleep tonight instead.

It's interesting how the C++ files used .cp for the file extension instead of the usual .cpp nowadays. I did some brief research, and my understanding is that .cp was used by the CodeWarrior IDE, which has now been replaced by Eclipse.

For the longest time, ".cpp" was the only suffix MSVC would compile, so that forced anybody doing cross-platform to conform. Recently, MSVC got an option to accept other suffixes, but the damage is done.

The obviously best choice is ".cc": your finger is already on the "c". But IDEs have led people to care less about ergonomic code organization.

Can you double tap a letter quicker than hitting 2 letters on 2 different keys? This is hair splitting, but I don't think 'cc' is necessarily better or faster than 'cp'. Maybe better than 'cpp' but that's an additional letter, AND having to "double tap" one.

This page actually crashes safari in iOS! Works all good on Firefox on same device!

> This page actually crashes safari in iOS!

FWIW, neither[1][2] crashes the current Safari for iOS (15.4).

[1] https://4e6.github.io/firefox-lang-stats/ [2] https://github.com/mozilla/gecko-dev/commit/3b56a9af51519d2e...

A large diff could crash a browser on an older or weaker device. I don't think Safari/WebKit has anything to do with it, though.

Firefox on iOS is a Safari reskin

It must be said, most of the C++ is very bad C++ code. It would be an overwhelmingly more effective use of developer attention to upgrade or replace old C++ and C with modern C++ than to rewrite them in Rust. In many cases, the existing code would be upgraded in place using modern constructs, but much of the C++ is really lightly-rebranded C.

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