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Ask HN: Ways for reading open source code bases?

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Re: Ask HN: Ways for reading open source code bases?

#11

Post by rajasaur »

Itd be good to get a debugger, connect it to the process and run through the code. You will find a pattern emerging when playing with the application, say, for different clicks of a webapp. After a few days, you will know how the flow works.

That said, Ive been more successful looking at the forums of an open source project, figure out what problems folks have and trying to solve them. You will be amazed to see how much you can learn about the code base and undocumented features solving those problems.

Re: Ask HN: Ways for reading open source code bases?

#13

Post by tptacek »

patio11 wrote: post #10
cperciva wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Did I mention 100 kloc of Perl?) Hey, you got off easy. Just imagine how much more work it would have been if everything had been done in a single line of Perl. :-)

70 hour workweeks, 3 hour daily commutes, salary below the median for a starting graduate from my alma mater, and debugging code written in India based on instructions translated by Babelfish: all of these I will endure without complaint. But I will not blackbox analyze Perl one-liners. That is just abusive.

... why DO you work 70 hour workweeks with 3 hour commutes for below-market wages? "Because, Japan"?

Re: Ask HN: Ways for reading open source code bases?

#14

Post by tptacek »

gte910h wrote: post #6

Doxygen is great if it understands your language in question

Doxygen is great when it Just Works, and pretty much useless when it doesn't. Even for languages it groks.

The problem with the Big Code Navigation Tools is that when they're wrong, they're misleading.

Re: Ask HN: Ways for reading open source code bases?

#15

Post by cperciva »

skywalker wrote: post #9
cperciva wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(Did I mention 100 kloc of Perl?) Hey, you got off easy. Just imagine how much more work it would have been if everything had been done in a single line of Perl. :-)

Yes. When I write anything in Perl I frequently try to compact what would be several lines in just a few obscure expressions. But as the Freebsd security head, what do you do to understand a large code base you probably aren't familiar with and its security implications?

But as the Freebsd security head, what do you do to understand a large code base you probably aren't familiar with and its security implications?

I ask someone to explain it to me.

Being FreeBSD Security Officer, I have an uncommon luxury: I have about 200 highly qualified developers available who will stop what they're doing and help me out if I say "so, umm, I sort of need to understand how this code works...".

Re: Ask HN: Ways for reading open source code bases?

#16

Post by pasbesoin »

cperciva wrote: post #5
patio11 wrote: post #3

Once upon a time, a client of the day job dropped a substantial Perl codebase on our desk and said "Tell us what this does." My boss gave me the job, and expected me to actually READ all the code, but given that I had no desire to read through 100 kloc of Perl code commented only in Japanese, I went for visualization instead: 1) Inspect several files for commonalities. Thankfully, the author was obsessive compulsive…

(Did I mention 100 kloc of Perl?) Hey, you got off easy. Just imagine how much more work it would have been if everything had been done in a single line of Perl. :-)

Or it might have been Klingon.

(Lest I be considered entirely off topic: http://www.perl.com/lpt/a/560 http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=88704 and search "klingon". Better the salariman, than Conway in a playful mood.)

Re: Ask HN: Ways for reading open source code bases?

#17

Post by gtani »

ruby:

http://eigenclass.org/hiki/rcodetools

http://railroad.rubyforge.org/

http://www.pathf.com/blogs/2008/12/read-the-source-luke-a-re...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37105/how-do-you-actually...

---------------------------

(you'll see lots of questions on stackoverflow: navigate/inspect/read source repo's)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1623906/programmatically-...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/935516/how-does-macos-dev...

python:

http://code.activestate.com/recipes/213898/

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1568544/given-a-python-cl...

emacs, vim, ctags, etags,

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1220456/navigating-effect...

Re: Ask HN: Ways for reading open source code bases?

#18

Post by mahmud »

tptacek wrote: post #13
patio11 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

70 hour workweeks, 3 hour daily commutes, salary below the median for a starting graduate from my alma mater, and debugging code written in India based on instructions translated by Babelfish: all of these I will endure without complaint. But I will not blackbox analyze Perl one-liners. That is just abusive.

... why DO you work 70 hour workweeks with 3 hour commutes for below-market wages? "Because, Japan"?

This happened "once upon a time", he might have done it while learning the ropes and picking up the language.
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