system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Is it feasible to understand the entirety of Firefox's source code?

Hi, I'm a programming noob, and I was wondering about this: Programming is very specific nowadays, and a modern web browser such as Firefox (or Chromium, for that matter) has thousands of developers working on it. Moreover, the people who work on the UI are different from the people who work on the JS interpreter and debugger, which are different from the people who work on the rendering engine, and so on.

As a hypothetical question, would it be possible to understand every nook and cranny of a massive software such as a modern web browser? I mean understand well enough to be able to read the source code of any given part and maintain/fix bugs anywhere. Bonus: Is there any "Renaissance" programmer who actually does that?
gpt
It's possible to have the underlying knowledge and comprehension that would make it (relatively) easy to familiarize yourself with a given piece of code quickly, but honestly, even for projects with a single developer, they can rarely keep track of all the moving parts at once. It's extremely common for developers to return to a portion of their own code base and realize they have forgotten all of the details, and have to refamiliarize themselves with it.