We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare

Re:We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare by lucideer on Sunday October 04, 2026 @02:47AM (#49951321)

This would've been great but given what they came out with on a greenfield project, I strongly suspect an in-Gmail approach would have ended up qualitatively worse from UX & design perspective, likely driving users away from Gmail as a whole, & not just Wave. It would've resulted in a backlash from the mainstream, rather than Wave which was simply a damp squib the mainstream mainly ignored.

In an ideal world you're right, but I still think it was an engineering failure as, theoretically, it should be easier to make something usable on a greenfield project, & it was a horrific mess.

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Re:We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare by btown on Sunday October 04, 2026 @11:47AM (#49954920)

It was the type of product that was an engineering impossibility to launch at the time. Mobile browsers of the time (and many users' desktop browsers!) couldn't run JS quickly enough to allow for the real-time experience - and reportedly Wave would consume 300-500 MB of RAM at the time, which was a ton for 2009!

https://theappslab.com/2009/10/05/google-wave-the-aftermath/

So they would have needed to invest in native mobile apps, and in significant levels of optimization. And none of this, not web or mobile, had the developer experience necessary to iterate quickly enough as the UI would inevitably evolve upon contact with customers, and you'd end up having many widgets reflecting a centralized global state.

Not to mention that you needed sticky server-side sessions to run the operational transformations efficiently, which harkens to the KV caching challenges that still challenge us today.

But it was an incredible dream, and it was a key source of inspiration to me to choose CS as a path.

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Re:We want you to build the next Git platform on Cloudflare by lucideer on Monday October 05, 2026 @11:06AM (#49965836)

There were plenty of apps at the time doing real-time experience, they just weren't running 300-500mb of RAM while doing so because they weren't overengineered by idiots.

There was nothing about the wave protocol or concept that necessitated the bloated mess of JS they churned out. A big part of the problem with optimisation, on top of it doing way too much in poorly thought through ways, was simply that nobody in Google even knew JS, because they were just transpiling Java to JS.

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