This is obviously project-specific, but most rewrites that I've been a part of a... | Hacker News

Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit

mrpopo on Oct 10, 2023 | parent | context | favorite | on: Firefox tooltip bug fixed after 22 years

This is obviously project-specific, but most rewrites that I've been a part of are usually not "re-implement everything from scratch", but rather "re-implement everything based on this new framework/library", which will usually be one more layer of software, on top of the few things to be salvaged from the original.

Small projects can be re-written; big projects like browsers, compilers, OSs require too much investment.

riffraff on Oct 10, 2023 [–]

but big projects keep changing nonetheless, as subsystems get replaced e.g. how many schedulers has Linux been through?

Or e.g. microsoft replaced WSL1 with a completely different approach in WSL2.

Sure it's still Windows but I would be surprised if most of today's code is the same it was in the year 2000.

Consider applying for YC's Fall 2026 batch! Applications are open till July 27.
Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact