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Comment by kevmoo1 | Hacker News Reader

We try hard to avoid spin.

From the article:

Google Ads, one of Dart's biggest customers, is committed to Dart and supports this new strategy. Scott Silver, VP of Engineering for Ads, says, “We are committed to building our next-generation web apps with Dart, and a renewed focus on generating optimal JavaScript helps us deliver great apps to everyone with a modern browser. Dart has significantly improved our engineers' productivity and our ability to quickly launch and iterate. We currently have one million lines of Dart code and the number is growing fast.” Many other teams inside of Google, such as Google Fiber, Google Express, and Google's internal sales team, use Dart for business-critical apps.

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one million lines of Dart code? All this work for displaying ads on the web. Something is not right with this world...

"Ads" is a short word but it covers a lot of complexity. There different formats for ads, different kinds of ad customers, different places where ads can be displayed, different ways of buying and selling ads, and then you have localization to different countries, etc. There are complex UI's that automatically reconfigure themselves based on the customer's needs.

A million lines of code is relatively small when you're trying to be all things to all ads customers in the world.

Still, could it be simpler? I hope so.

I read Google Ads as the business unit, not the "displaying ads". I don't really know how anyone would read "Google Ads" and "million lines+" and think wow, all that for banner ads?

Alas, I'm writing this and reading the above..

They make like $72bn annual revenue off the back of that product though so in terms of revenue per line of code it might not be too bad! :)

You do know that is how Google makes money, rigth?

If it doesn't serve ads it doesn't release cool open source projects no self driving cars, no Anjular JS, no google maps, gmail and so on.

Hey, it makes the world go 'round. Bash it all you want, it provides a useful service to businesses.

"We realized that the goal of putting Dartium in every browser was monopolistic and made us look bad, even if we had good intentions" would be avoiding spin.

This is a setback for Dart and Dart's mission statement, and everyone knows it, and everyone also knows it's been a long time coming.

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