Because I previously worked on the Chromium codebase at Google I have a 'specialist' dev workstation, an HP Z840 dual 18 core Xeon with 256GB of RAM. And that's a model from many years ago now, the newer specialist workstations are even heftier. To work on chrome @ Google you absolutely need one.
That said, if you're using cached builds via goma and have a nice fat pipe it can go quite fast without making your machine sweat much.
It's an absolutely massive code base. I wish I could explain why, but it is. No single part sticks out as bloat to me. I could never get CLion (among other tools) to index it properly.
Maybe someone can create a Goma-equivalent for ungoogled chromium, but it's the project's explicit goal to not depend on Google stuff (they actually apply hundreds of patches to the code to remove built-in google service references) so a Google-supplied Goma cache won't be of much use to this project's builds.
These days I work on a team at Google that provides distributed build infrastructure for non-Google3 projects, including goma. But unfortunately it's not available to the outside world, despite being built with that in mind.
That said, if you're using cached builds via goma and have a nice fat pipe it can go quite fast without making your machine sweat much.
It's an absolutely massive code base. I wish I could explain why, but it is. No single part sticks out as bloat to me. I could never get CLion (among other tools) to index it properly.