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Comment by andrewflnr | Hacker News Reader

> An unsolved problem is how to program a webbrowser in less than 20 KLOC.

Can you even specify a modern web browser in under 20k lines of English? Between the backward compatibility and huge multimedia APIs, including all the references, I'd be surprised.

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Given the absolute behemoth of scope laid out in the W3C specs, I don't think that's even possible.

https://codetabs.com/count-loc/count-loc-online.html

Using LadybirdBrowser/ladybird & ignoring the following folders:

.devcontainer,.github,Documentation,Tests,Toolchain,Libraries

...Yields about 36k lines of C++. With the libraries, the LOC count balloons to 310k.

If a still-in-alpha browser already has 300k lines of code to deal with, there's very little chance that a spec-compliant browser will be able to do the same within 30k lines.

I mean, the point of STEPS is in fact to do things in orders of magnitude less code than languages like C++. 310k is almost encouraging. :D

I have never understood why nobody wrote a web browser on top of SmallTalk.

Never? There is a web browser named Scamper.

I know about Scamper, but it is dead.

I've been thinking about SmallTalk web browser 4 years ago, more in-depth here: https://www.reddit.com/r/smalltalk/comments/jnigzb/native_we...

Since then, a lot have changed. One dedicated SmallTalker with LLM-infused Squeak might do wonders.

Coincidentally, some weeks ago, I made it somewhat loadable to Pharo 13. But its practical value is, of course, questionable.

What was your motivation to do this?

I made the conversion of the Squeak verison to Pharo many years ago and I just tried to make it work in the latest version (which was not straightforward becasue Pharo deprecated and removed some Morphic parts it used). So, mostly the curiosity if it can still work and, if yes, how well/poorly.

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