So my manager today asked me if I could stay later when there’s broken things in prod, and then today his star dream employee yolo’ed a full stack change into prod without review. It’s fucking massive and implements new API endpoints, touches >20 files. Many of the diffs are too large to render in the browser.
It’s almost comical, but something immediately broke.
Most of my day, I’m digging through code to identify bugs created from this shit, just to get a stealth merge midday.
I kind of don’t know what to do.
browsers are quite capable of rendering text, even images!
But they’re bad at it. Especially in performance and amount.
Edit: drag&drop kernel.log in your brower, if you don’t believe me.
Not true. Browsers are definitely faster handling text than your average terminal emulator without GPU capabilities, they just use more resources.
That said, GitHub diff viewer specifically is a sluggish mess. But that’s not because of the browser.
What, you think the usual text editor renders all lines just because? No, they load the lines that are currently visible + some more for scrolling. At least the ones that don’t choke on a mere 100k lines. And they don’t need GPU for this.
But webbrowser engines just aren’t made for this, but for DOM rendering.
So does a browser. Modern browsers don’t even need to receive the whole HTML to start rendering things.
There’s a lot of engineering effort put into browsers, much more than in terminal emulators because they need to do much more than just rendering text.
Ok, maybe i have a slight bias, because editors in-browser are usually a system-in-system(-in-system) JS mess.