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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?

#151

Post by pandler »

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.

Also agree! I learned a lot about how Python works from digging through the inner guts of the Django ORM. I’ve been pleasantly surprised, getting back into Django after about 5 years, that the codebase is just as comprehensible as I remember it to be, and the documentation equally as comprehensive.

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

#153

Post by dataflow »

jihadjihad wrote: post #37

For canonical C code, without a doubt I would say Redis and Postgres. Redis is written and annotated in a way that even someone with a cursory knowledge of C can understand what's going on. For Python, I really like how SQLAlchemy is written and designed. For Rust, ripgrep stands out as a sterling example of how to write a powerful low-level utility like that.

I just opened up server.c in Redis (not familiar with Redis and never seen it before) and at first glance it seems... alright, but I'm not sure what's particularly outstanding about it, and it could definitely be better. Some of the logic seems questionable (exit() in a signal handler? [9] also what about thread safety?), and more superficially (but annoyingly) I see: names like "sdscatprintf" [1] which are a little cryptic, lack of attention to spacing (too little [2] or too much [3] or inconsistent [4] [8]), lack of braces for single-line blocks (which at least I consider bad) [5], irritatingly inconsistent line breaks [6], etc.

Overall it's still definitely on the more readable side compared to other C code I've seen, I like the thorough comments, and it's generally decent, but I'm not particularly coming away from it in awe like everyone else seems to have.

[1] https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/server.c#...

[2] https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/server.c#...

[3] https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/server.c#...

[4] https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/server.c#...

[5] https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/server.c#...

[6] https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/server.c#...

[7] https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/server.c#...

[8] https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/server.c#...

[9] https://github.com/antirez/redis/blob/unstable/src/server.c#...

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

#154

Post by jbarham »

Congeec wrote: post #150

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...

I used Tornado to build the the WebSocket back end for this page: https://www.slickdns.com/live/. It's less than 100 lines of code and very clean.

For most web apps my default choice is Django, but for special purpose web servers Tornado or Flask are still useful.

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

#155

Post by chimpburger »

dongecko wrote: post #87
GoMonad wrote: post #11

Anything by John Carmack. (DOOM's open source release, for example)

I'd second that. Some years ago I had a look at the quake 3 bots code, which I think were also written by John Carmack. The code was amazingly intuitive.

The Q3 bot AI was written by this man https://doomwiki.org/wiki/J.M.P_van_Waveren_(MrElusive)

Carmack said that he was "the best developer I ever worked with"

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

#156

Post by mehrdadn »

chimpburger wrote: post #152
mehrdadn wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any chance you could elaborate? How/why?

Redis is widely used in production environments. The code quality matters.

> Redis is widely used in production environments. The code quality matters.

That's how you judge source code quality? By measuring its popularity? And ignoring the actual code?

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

#157

Post by GuB-42 »

dror wrote: post #140
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…

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 deve…

I don't have a problem with that code. It is idiomatic C code, like *p++ or flag &= ~mask. ++i is a bit less common than i++ but nothing unusual. The lack of of error checking is more concerning though. It can be justified though, and it brings me to the next point.

The comment is the worst part. It is useless, it literally repeats the most obvious part of the code. A good comment would be something like "there is no error checking because arguments are already validated in the GUI, also 0 is an acceptable default".

For me, comments should not repeat what the code is doing. Comments are for expressing what is in the the mind of the developer that cannot be expressed in code. Example : "constant found using empirical testing", "Hermite spline formula" or "required on Windows". (Edit: the Hermite spline example is actually a bad one, a better idea would be to write a function called hermite_spline_formula instead)

If some coding rule require you to comment, find something to say about your code that isn't your code. It will also help you think more about what you just wrote.

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

#158

Post by coldtea »

dwild wrote: post #90
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…

> Postgres codebase is what got me out of the "good code is self documenting" nonsense. I'm a fervent believer in "good code is self-documenting", so I was curious to be proven wrong, clicked randomly until I found code and I saw this. /* * Round off to MAX_TIMESTAMP_PRECISION decimal places. * Note: this is also used for rounding off intervals. */ #define TS_PREC_INV 1000000.0 #define TSROUND(j) (rint(((double) (j))…

>If it was named TIMESTAMP_ROUND, I wouldn't need to know "Round off to MAX_TIMESTAMP_PRECISION decimal places."

TSROUND is already as obvious as TIMESTAMP_ROUND. TS is a very common abbreviation of timestamp.

And you would still need to know the decimal places.

The real issue is that it's based on TS_PREC_INV and not MAX_TIMESTAMP_PRECISION as per the comment (though MAX_TIMESTAMP_PRECISION might still agree with the decimals offered by TS_PREC_INV, it's not obvious here, and would need manual work to keep them in sync).

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

#159

Post by mistrial9 »

cryptica wrote: post #109

Unfortunately, I've found that almost all developers are incapable of objectively judging the quality of code until they actually have to start working with it and then after a few months they can start to appreciate or despise the code. It takes a lot of investment from a developer before they can appreciate the beauty of the code... To make matters more confusing, a lot of developers tend to become extremely attach…

.. for some meanings of "good" .. aside from that one over-generality, valid insights yes
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