Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

"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."

Ignoring the inaccuracy regarding Javascript, what is so surprising about writing code "by hand"? Am I missing something?




A lot of the JavaScript at Google is written in Java and then compiled down to JS with GWT[1].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Web_Toolkit


@frog: They use it entirely for Wave. That's it though.

And I really don't think that they use JS on the backend for GMail. I figured it was Python or Java.


Perhaps they're using node?


Google has an open source product that compiles Java to JS.


I'm familiar with GWT, but I'm not sure that really answers my question.


Personally, I think the surprising part is such a large codebase (including server side code?) being written completely in Javascript.


Google or not, Gmail or not, writing a 440KLOC Javascript server-side program seems like a really bad idea to me.




Consider applying for YC's Spring batch! Applications are open till Feb 11.

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: