I travel a bunch and have lived abroad and I always consistently only ever miss breakfast restaurants/diners and breakfast foods.

TIL I didn’t realize Java used UTF16 for its internal representation. Looks like it’s a bit more complicated than that after Java 9 too

Android defaults to UTF16

It is a fantastic way to make sure things work across a team. We use Linux (bunch of different distro) and macOS at my company and once I started packaging things with nix environment related issues mostly went away. It’s not perfect and it’s not necessarily easy to learn nix, but I prefer it to sharing docker containers or other alternatives.

Sorry I didn’t mean to imply they don’t use shared libs, they definitely do, but they have to integrate them into the larger system still and put consistent interfaces over them.

JavaScript alone is not a simple beast. It needs to be optimized to deal with modern JavaScript web apps so it needs JIT, it also needs sandboxing, and all of the standard web APIs it has to implement. All of this also needs to be robust. Browsers ingest the majority of what people see on the Internet and they have to handle every single edge case gracefully. Robust software is actually incredibly difficult and good error handling often adds a lot more code complexity. Security in a browser is also not easy, you’re parsing a bunch of different untrusted HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You’re also executing untrusted code.

Then there is the monster that is CSS and layout. I can’t imagine being the people that have to write code dealing with that it’d drive me crazy.

Then there are all of the image formats, HTML5 canvases, videos, PDFs, etc. These all have to be parsed safely and displayed correctly as well.

There is also the entire HTTP spec that I didn’t even think to bring up. Yikes is that a monster too, you have to support all versions. Then there is all of that networking state and TLS + PKI.

There is likely so much that I’m still leaving out, like how all of this will also be cross platform and sometimes even cross architecture.