A Blog
GMail & JavaScript
July 25, 2010
At the USENIX annual conference last month, Gmail engineer Adam de Boor surprised the audience by noting that the company’s Gmail service was written entirely in JavaScript, and that all of its code, around 443,000 lines worth, was written by hand.
Via PC World and Hacker News (of course).
I’m a little skeptical of that line count on JavaScript though. I really thought that GWT was created specifically for GMail. Regardless, that’s a pretty astounding size for JavaScript. I truly want to know what tools they use to write and manage that much, since in my experience, once you hit several thousand lines, it starts to become a pain to manage/debug/maintain.
Written by Scott Williams who lives and works in sunny Phoenix, AZ. Twitter is also a place.