But this isn't a company with a small amount of customers. If you have a hundred adapters, and a thousand customers, your development costs per customer should be lower than DIY could reach.
Especially because you really know what you're doing by the time you write that tenth adapter, so each one is higher quality and much faster to make.
In the analogy, yes you could write a vector implementation in an afternoon. But if 50 other devs do the same thing, and then we add on all the debugging time, it starts to look like they're putting in more work than the big generic centralized version took.
> If you have a hundred adapters, and a thousand customers, your development costs per customer should be lower than DIY could reach
Hmm I don't think so because I think software complexity isn't linear. Meaning going from 1 unit of complexity to 2 is probably much, much easier than going from 99 to 100.
Depends because sharing logic like that can be dangerous. Each system is going to have exceptions and unique properties, and SOME will leak into the shared space. This is a hard problem. If what you were saying were true, software would be perfect. It's not though, it sucks ass.
I mean, try writing an API for 100 different consumers with different needs. Good luck! They're gonna ask you for X ... Z and B depends on F but F can't exist with C and C is just a bad idea overall but also O is there and that changes things and...
Especially because you really know what you're doing by the time you write that tenth adapter, so each one is higher quality and much faster to make.
In the analogy, yes you could write a vector implementation in an afternoon. But if 50 other devs do the same thing, and then we add on all the debugging time, it starts to look like they're putting in more work than the big generic centralized version took.