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Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?

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Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?

#131

Post by bitwize »

cameronbrown wrote: post #103
bitwize wrote: post #34

NetBSD, hands down. Beautiful, simple to understand, consistent. The documentation is also top notch -- I wrote a trivial character-device kernel driver using only the man pages as a reference. And you can too. Also -- the source code to Doom. Read it, marvel at its clarity and efficiency -- and then laugh when you realize that the recent console ports were completely rewritten in fucking Unity . And the Switch versi…

Unity sucks but as a hobbyist game developer it is a godsend. The only other way I can support all the platforms I want to (Android, web, PC) is through Web APIs directly, and nobody likes more Electron.

SDL be like "am I a joke to you?"

Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?

#132

Post by CDSlice »

mehrdadn wrote: post #93
ekidd wrote: post #39

Anything by burntsushi, but especially xsv and ripgrep: xsv: https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv ripgrep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep His code typically has extensive tests, helpful comments, and logical structure. It was fun trying to imitate his style when writing a PR for xsv. The Quake 2 engine was also pretty interesting: It was almost totally undocumented, and it had plenty of weird things going on. But…

Note: this assumes you speak Rust...

Don't all the comments assume you speak the language the codebase is written in? I mean I can't tell if a given PHP/C/Perl/other language I don't know well codebase is good or not. I guess there could be people that can somehow do that...

Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?

#134

Post by wp381640 »

tschwimmer wrote: post #55

Perhaps I'm jaded, but I notice that all the examples given here are developer tools or otherwise things with well scoped functional inputs and outputs (e.g. ffmpeg). Anyone have an example of a consumer application that has a good codebase? Chromium, GitLab, OpenOffice, etc? I feel like such applications inherently have more spaghetti because the human problems they're aiming to solve are less concretly scoped. Even…

It shouldn't be a surprise that developers are more likely to read and understand the source code of development tools

Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?

#136

Post by [deleted] »

tomsmeding wrote: post #102
ashafer wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree. I've gotten to work with both of these at my summer job and it's been an absolute pleasure.

You've gotten to work with both NetBSD and Doom in one summer job? Now I'm really curious what you've been doing. I think I may want that too.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?

#137

Post by mixologic »

holy_city wrote: post #71
jakewins wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Second this; Postgres codebase is what got me out of the "good code is self documenting" nonsense. For those of us in the database space it is an incredible resource - and overall a great example of good code. sqlite is much less complex, but similarly approachable. In more recent examples, I think you see a lot of this same reader-centric pragmatic ethos in many Go projects. The Kubernetes codebase comes to mind as…

>the "good code is self documenting" nonsense Man I hate dogma like that. My "common sense" comment style is always, "code tells me how, comments tell me why." The only exception is in hand optimized code where I'll non-doc comment what the reference implementation would be above the optimized version, which is _sometimes_ necessary when tests aren't in the same translation unit.

Totally agree. It is impossible to show why one tradeoff was chosen over another without comments. Is there a loop unrolled for performance reasons? Is there a design goal that looks complex on the inside, but yields a simple, easy to understand API on the outside? I feel like "good code is self documenting" is a pitfall that devs always fall into believing on their journey to becoming a "Senior", and then somewhere along the way run into their old "good" code and can understand what it does perfectly well enough, but cant recall the circumstances that led them to arrive at the choices they made in writing that code.

Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?

#138

Post by penguat »

Izkata wrote: post #126
quadcore wrote: post #117

it seems that in real life, a really high-quality codebase is hard to come by I think a common misconception amongst mid-experienced programmers is that they confuse look with quality. Reading clean written code gives you a feeling of control and also the feeling that someone must have thought about that program. It's reassuring. You have in front of you a code that gives you trust. When in fact, that code can be com…

> by running it in your head. I have encountered far too many people who don't even realize this is a thing. I figure they must be doing it in some limited form and just aren't recognizing it as a skill that can be trained up, otherwise I'm not sure how they can do any development, but...

I don't always run the code in my head exactly - i do something more important, which is consider the set of possible situations the code can be in, and look for problems.

Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?

#140

Post by dror »

taspeotis wrote: post #123
orneryostrich wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Keldon Jones’ Race for the Galaxy AI is brilliant. Every line is documented C. It trains and deploys a neural net. It has a fast and functional GUI. Most diehard RftG players have cut their teeth by losing to Keldon a few dozen times before really learning the game. Keldon was contracted a few years later to develop the RftG apps on iOS and Android, which are easily worth $4. Source: https://github.com/bnordli/rftg P…

> Every line is documented C Every line? Oh dear [1]: /* Set verbose flag */ verbose++; ... /* Set advanced flag */ advanced = 1; ... /* Set expansion level */ expansion = atoi(argv[++i]); ... /* Initialize game */ init_game(&my_game); I assume the verbose flag is incremented because there's multiple levels of verbosity, whereas the advanced flag is a boolean, and i is incremented because expansion is not a command l…

Actually, this line:

/* Set expansion level */

    expansion = atoi(argv[++i]);
Is an example of ugly code. They're doing multiple things in one line, and in a confusing order.

# Increment i by 1.

# Grab the command line argument in position i

# Convert from string to integer.

# Assign to the variable expansion.

Note that there's no error checking to handle strings that don't convert to ints.

Arguably, any serious C developer can read this on the fly, but I seriously object to code with side-effects like the above ++i. It's often confusing to read and change.

I'm not criticizing the original author, more nit-picking on this as an example of great code.

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