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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?

#141

Post by laumars »

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…

sqlite is the usual example of elegant code in a domain that often breads inelegant code.

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

#143

Post by bitwize »

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.

Think about it. When you stand up a new ARM-processor embedded widget for the first time, what are two of the first things you do to verify it works?

1) Port NetBSD to it

2) Port Doom to it

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

#144

Post by mehrdadn »

CDSlice wrote: post #132
mehrdadn wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Yes, but other comments actually mention the language, and the original post was using web languages as an example, so I thought I'd save someone the trouble of clicking expecting and realizing it's not what they expected.

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

#146

Post by teknopaul »

kstrauser wrote: post #130
taspeotis wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Yikes, I've gotta agree: /* Exit */ exit(1); Well, yes, I see that. It might have been helpful to extend that to "Exit with an error status", perhaps, but as-is it tells you literally nothing that the code doesn't.

IMHO Coding guides should ban "SBO comments" Statin the Bleedin Obvious. Let devs decide what SBO is, usually its bleedin obvious.

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

#147

Post by kamyarg »

oaxacaoaxaca wrote: post #114

Django! And django rest framework. To me, both codebases are so readable and so well put together that even if their documentation was bad (which it isn't), you could fully grasp their APIs and how to use their libraries by just reading through some of the code.

Second this; dove into Django and DRF source multiple times in the past, always got out with more than I wanted. Ofcourse on 95% of the occasions the docs are good enough.

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

#148

Post by bamboozled »

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…

I think everything from Hashicorp is absolutely top-notch, working on their stuff taught me to be a much better Ruby and Go programmer.

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

#149

Post by myth_drannon »

slondr wrote: post #106
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…

NetHack's source code is absolutely beautiful. It's probably the most well-kept, well-designed, well-structured and well-implemented K&R C program in history. Although they are switching to ANSI syntax soon. It's even more amazing because NetHack is (1) a video game, where generally speaking code quality is sacrificed for efficiency, and (2) it has been developed by a constantly changing team of volunteers over the c…

I bet they didn't have sprints and OKR like increasing the number of active users by 50% in one quarter. Nethack is a product of love to rogues and hobby software development.

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

#150

Post by Congeec »

Tornado, a python web framework. I doubt it is still popular today. But reading the source code is a pleasure. Its naming conveys clearly; its encapsulation allows extensibility; its documentation teaches me how to write an industry-level library.

https://github.com/tornadoweb/tornado/blob/master/tornado/io...

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