I doubt that Firefox is better, I seem to remember that building Firefox and the VIA C3 processor years back as around half a day of compiling, but was also an extremely poorly choose CPU for the task.
Back in early 2000s a friend of mine was mentioning on IRC how middle clicking on a scrollbar in Mozilla under X11 didn't jump to the clicked point like in other X11 GUI programs. I was full into the Mozilla hype back then (the project was basically at its apex of coolness :-P) and wanted to get people into it, so i thought "this is opensource, right? I can do it myself and convince people how great Mozilla is".
Problem being, i had a Pentium MMX @ 200MHz with 128MB of RAM. It took at least six hours to do a build (most likely more, i felt asleep at some point during the night, then woke up ~5-6h later, was still compiling and i left to go out with a friend and was done when i came back some time later). Even if i didn't make a change and tried to recompile it took half an hour.
Fortunately i had already done some GUI programs by that point (and even tried to make my own GUI systems and toolkits) so i had a rough idea where to look and it didn't took too long to figure out the CPP file where scrollbar behavior was implemented (though it did take some extra hours).
I did submit it and remember being impressed by the process of having my patch to be "reviewed" and then "super reviewed", thinking that it now makes sense how Mozilla is of high quality (remember, i was a teenager big into the hype, everything was filtered through the most positive lens). FWIW i was asked to make a couple of minor changes but it was merged in.
I don't think i'd have as much patience these days, the last time i tried to build some relatively complex piece of software so i can contribute to it was with Krita, but that took only about an hour (including getting everything needed to build) - and it didn't work at the end (it built but crashed at startup) so i decided to try some other time as i had lost interest by that point to debug why it didn't work :-P.
Firefox builds are seemingly more modular. I was hacking on the Firefox devtools a while back, which from source involved downloading a pre-build main brower binary and building just devtools from your source. This made it significantly faster due to not having to build the rest of Firefox from source. Of course, this will all depend on which part of the source code you're changing.
Zotero has (had?) a really cool build system. Zotero is written on an Electron-like architecture, except it uses a Gecko-based runtime instead of Blink. (Firefox is the same way and has always been this way, and this predates not just Electron, but Chrome/Chromium, too.) Similar to the way that Electron apps' build scripts generally work by downloading a prebuilt Electron (rather than requiring developers build it from source), Zotero works by downloading a release build of Firefox, unarchiving everything, sweeping away all the XHTML/XUL/CSS/JS that comprises the Firefox UI and application logic, and then swapping in the components that make up Zotero. (In other words, just how it should work 90+% of contributors who want to submit patches against Firefox nightlies, too.)
But that's also not a requirement, either, that's just what it took for a 40 minute clean build time.
No idea where you're pulling your 99% figure from, but it seems quite unlikely.
Regardless, if compiling Chromium or similar large code bases is a thing you want to do regularly, it's unlikely to present a significant burden.
My personal machine is very mid-spec'ed because my personal projects are all small and don't really require much.
Even my work machine tops out at 32Gb RAM which has always been plenty, even for our comparatively large codebases (although more is always welcome :)).
I certainly wouldn't spend that for a one-off patch to an open source project, but if you're doing this regularly it's not exactly a steep upgrade either
That, it also means you are going to spend a lot of time on it before you can even attempt to do anything.
Overall, there can be a pretty substantial amount of effort involved before you are even ready to make a PR of any kind. Then it remains to be seen if it is well received by the people who can approve it.
You mention Firefox, my dealings with various contributors and people at Mozilla over the years would make me very hesitant to even consider diving into the deep end. To be fair, I have had good interactions with various people as well. But a lot of communication also has been just outright difficult.
All of this also throws out the "if you don't like it, you can just fork it" mindset.
1. <https://www.colbyrussell.com/2013/08/06/patches-wanted.html>
> The phrase "patches welcome" has come not to be.
Which I am already missing context for to make sense out of. Where was this phrase used, by who?
I get a general idea of what it is about and what the intention is but it isn't all that clear as I am missing the surrounding context.
There are 200 results for "patches welcome" on HN:
<https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=5&prefix=false&qu...>
The top results on Google for the phrase "patches welcome", most being posts written around the 4-, 5-, 6-year mark after the post I linked to, are all based on the same premise: "patches welcome" is (a) common, and (b) not what anyone wants to hear.
<https://www.google.com/search?num=100&q=%22patches%20welcome...>
E.g.:
> "Patches Welcome". We've all seen it in the Open Source community. Nothing makes me angrier than these two words.
<https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/2016-02-17-patches-welcome/>
But I'm also missing some context here; my "Huh?" was rather more directed at the part of the remark that says "[...] for me to agree or disagree with it".
Around 6-7 years back, I was able to make a change & build Firefox from source on a mid-range gaming laptop without much fiddling. I think the build took may be around an hour or more and it was not too long to stand out.
I haven't tried building chromium to compare but from my past experience, Firefox's build was not too challenging for first time contributors.
For a long time I would build Firefox from source every morning, and I don't have the build logs anymore but I would guess it was in the range of 60 to 75 minutes. Comparing building anything on a VIA C3 is not serious, nor is using some 5400rpm disk for the same task
Wow, your rust experience is way different from mine (not just FF, I mean invocations of rustc are where time goes to die). I also readily admit that I struggled constantly with trying to get sccache to behave sanely, so I'm open to that being part of the difference, too
I used to leave things like that running overnight in the old days.
All subsequent builds are just going to be compiling the one or two files you changed and then linking in the other 99.9%, which isn't going to take very long.
This shit shouldnt need this many resources for debug builds