Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

#1

Post by idlewords » Tue, Oct 13, 2009, 2:20 PM UTC

I realized recently that it's been a long time since I looked at anyone else's code outside of the context of debugging or working on it for hire. In your opinion, what are some examples of particularly well-designed or implemented software projects worth looking at to broaden one's own horizons as a programmer?

Re: Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

#2

Post by avinashv » Tue, Oct 13, 2009, 2:52 PM UTC

SQLite's source listing is great. I learned a lot about good C practices and documentation reading it.

Re: Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

#3

Post by arthurk » Tue, Oct 13, 2009, 2:55 PM UTC

If you're interested in literate programming: TeX

Re: Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

#4

Post by jeduan » Tue, Oct 13, 2009, 2:59 PM UTC

Anyone willing to recommend a Java project worth studying?

Re: Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

#5

Post by projectileboy » Tue, Oct 13, 2009, 3:01 PM UTC

I highly recommend both Paul Graham's source code for Arc (http://ycombinator.com/arc/arc3.tar), as well as the source code for Quake and Quake II (http://www.idsoftware.com/business/techdownloads/).

Re: Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

#6

Post by lpolovets » Tue, Oct 13, 2009, 3:05 PM UTC

This is half answer/half tangent, but I like http://www.google.com/codesearch a lot for browsing and reading code. A fun thing to do is to look at how others implement something you want to implement, or use some library you want to use. You end up finding a lot of different ways of doing the same thing, and if you find something that you want to explore more, it's easy to browse around.

Re: Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

#7

Post by scott_s » Tue, Oct 13, 2009, 3:11 PM UTC

The Linux kernel: http://miller.cs.wm.edu/

Re: Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

#8

Post by jsyedidia » Tue, Oct 13, 2009, 3:14 PM UTC

I highly recommend the Stanford GraphBase, written by Donald Knuth. It's C code written by Knuth using the literate programming tool CWEB. If you don't know about CWEB, it's not hard to learn how to use, and probably is already installed on your system if you have TeX. The Stanford GraphBase is available for free download on Knuth's web-site, and also comes bound in a nice paperback book, that was reprinted in 2009. Knuth also makes available many other programs written using CWEB on his web-site, but I would start with the GraphBase.