[benkuhn]

Simplicity, orthogonality, elegance, modularity, etc. are useful when you want to build lots of different things easily.

When you're building one single thing that's used by 4.6 billion people, it turns out that percentage optimizations matter!

(I work for a company that built a shitty half-baked homegrown QUIC equivalent because in rural Ethiopia, HTTPS handshakes were so slow that they literally just didn't work. Glad that Google is optimizing our percent-of-a-percent use case!)

[baybal2]

The thing is, what Google does often doesn't work.

Unsound hacks that kind of work "acceptable" in A/B test telemetry and slowly break in real life from inherent design deficiency, are almost always worse than something saying from the start "will not work on bugged os/hardware version, but work really well on standard compliant ones"

The TLS 1.3 hack a Google engineer has forced through IETF is now backfiring for example. They did it to hack around a certain brand of middleboxes, but the hack instead broke few other ones, and embedded http servers. They may well errata it, and go back to normal versioning in 1.4, despite putting it on paper in 1.3 that the hack is here permanently.

[tialaramex]

> The TLS 1.3 hack a Google engineer has forced through IETF is now backfiring for example.

How is it "backfiring"? It seems to be working for billions of people. If you've got a non-compliant TLS implementation that broke you get to keep both halves, good luck with that.

[algesten]

I hadn't heard the tls 1.3 version hack being a problem. You have a link where I can read about it?