We live in a time now where libraries are free and plentiful and pretty good. It is easy to forget that this was not the case for the vast majority of time that computers have existed.
Chrome’s original design definitely predates our current rich ecosystem. Plus, V8 and Chrome’s performance profile are demanding enough that there would be a pretty high bar for those dependencies anyway.
Chrome was invented in 2008. Abseil[1] didn't exist publicly until 2017, derived partly from Chromium.
HarfBuzz wasn't ported to C++ until 2010. I don't know the entire constellation of libs Chrome would use if it was designed in C++ today, but I bet a lot of them didn't exist before Chrome or were even created partly as a downstream byproduct of Chromium.
In other ecosystems: if Chrome were designed in Rust in 2008, there would be no crates.io to pull from. There would be no NPM, since Node followed V8/Chrome's invention in 2009. Maven Central had ~50K packages in 2009[2], which was a lot back then. In 2026, Maven Central hosts over 3 million.
I think you've come from an npm world because c++ still doesn't have a great library ecosystem if thats what you mean.
> In other ecosystems: if Chrome were designed in Rust in 2008, there would be no crates.io to pull from. There would be no NPM, since Node followed V8/Chrome's invention in 2009. Maven Central had ~50K packages in 2009[2], which was a lot back then. In 2026, Maven Central hosts over 3 million.
Yeah, this is all web development stuff.... Doesn't apply to c++
Chrome’s original design definitely predates our current rich ecosystem. Plus, V8 and Chrome’s performance profile are demanding enough that there would be a pretty high bar for those dependencies anyway.