I'm having a very hard time to believe you need one third of that to
maintain a library that does "shorter names for standard CSS." Of course I might be underestimating Tailwind a lot.
According to that document, they spent ~1.5M eur (1.75 USD) on developer salaries. If we count up all the people in the "Development Team" section (other than the ones paid by grant, which I excluded from the number above), we have 22 full time developer listed. That's ~$80k (USD) / developer for the all in costs, so the actual salary is probably lower than that. US News tells us[1] that the median US developer is getting ~$132k / year. To put that into a bit of perspective, the local gas station by me is paying staff $15 / hour. That's ~30k / year.
As a side note, what the heck is with all the griping about costs in this discussion? So what if it's "just a big CSS library". Don't we want people to be paid good salaries? I swear software developers are one of the only groups of people I've ever met who actively complain about being paid too much money.
That is truly incredible and an ode to what can be done with a relatively small budget. You’re right that Tailwind is nowhere near Blender’s complexity… but it’s also trying to be a business and not a foundation.
Tailwind (like most things) is way more complex than it first appears.
Sure the main thing was originally 'just' mapping `.p-4` to `padding: 1rem`. But it's also about grepping the code to see if `p-4` is used so it only builds needed classes. It also needs to work with things like their responsive and state classes so `md:p-4` or `hover:p-4` add the padding only on medium or larger screens, or when hovered etc.
All of which increased to support more and more css features and arbitrary values so `not-supports-[display:grid]:p-[5px]` generates the required code to check if grid is supported and add 5px padding or whatever other values you put in the [].
You can question if that's really a sensible idea, but it is undeniably a pretty complex challenge. Not sure it compares to blender, I imagine that has a lot more maths involved - put probably less edge cases and weird displays odd in X browser bugs.
I'm having a very hard time to believe you need one third of that to maintain a library that does "shorter names for standard CSS." Of course I might be underestimating Tailwind a lot.
[0] https://download.blender.org/foundation/Blender-Foundation-A... [1] But given the unit is euro in this report, I guess the solution is to not hire developers in the US.