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What a bizarre comparison, WhatsApp engineers didn't have to review code for millions of users.


What a bizarre statement. cURL is basically maintained by a single person, and nearly the whole world uses it.


> cURL is basically maintained by a single person

Suppose Flutter may be an order or two magnitude more complex than cURL.


Absolutely, yes! Then make it two or three people, maybe 10 and there are still n-times too many people working on flutter compared to cURL.

Which boils down to: Number of devs vs. people using something is a very bad metric. Even number of supported devices won't work good in this case (I assume cURL runs basically everywhere).

I think it's very difficult to estimate complexity, and then make a statement about "how many people are enough" is even more difficult. Some environments are harder and more complex, some are just very heterogen and some are both. Sometimes it's the organizational overhead, maybe even something else.


Two orders of magnitude would be 100, not 10.


I'm not sure that something being 100x more complex means you need 100x more people.

plus they said an "order or two" which would be 10-100x so ...


glib then?


How is it bizarre to compare the impact of a low number of engineers affecting millions of people. In the case of WhatsApp it was 35 engineers affecting 350 million people.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39447564


The support needs of developers is generally higher than those of a messaging user. How often have you had to contact the support of a messaging app you use? Now think about how often you create a Github issue or PR for an open source repo.




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