Comment by kgeist
1 year ago
Chromium's codebase isn't so bad for a first timer. Years ago our product had a bug on Windows where if you paste an image from the clipboard, the image had garbage in it (something to do with alpha channels). I realized Chrome has no such bug so they probably had a workaround. It took me like 30 minutes of lurking around in the codebase for the first time to find their workaround and apply it to our code.
> Chromium's codebase isn't so bad for a first timer.
Agreed
> It took me like 30 minutes
I can tell you didn't need to build it ;)
Why build it if you are just reading? I find https://source.chromium.org/chromium wonderful. With things like go-to-definition and find-all-overridden-functions working wonderfully well.
I find this to be ideal when working with a large codebase. I don't even need an editor with fancy intelligence features and LSP integration; a bare bones vim or emacs paired with a website with all the intelligence already there.
> Why build it if you are just reading?
Is this a serious question? Assuming it is, to insert printf statement, or attach a debugger and step through the program and take backtraces to supplement or confirm the information you gather from reading the code.
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One thing Chromium does really well is hooking up cross references in the code search tool (source.chromium.org). This makes it easy to browse, see where things are called from, subclassed, etc. Github feels far behind on this.
I’m pretty sure that code search webpage is the external facing version or Google’s internal code search, which they use to index their huge internal monorepo, so it makes sense that it works well.
last year I worked with js and chrome gave me a weird exception (I think it was something with websockets and ssl? I don't remember). I googled the exception, and found the exception in the chromium sourcecode and quickly found out when exactly that exception was triggered, and could then easily fix my js.
I too was pleasantly surprised how readable it was.