Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

https://github.com/google/leveldb/blob/master/table/table_bu...

https://github.com/google/re2/blob/master/re2/nfa.cc

I have heard good things about sqlite, and some day, I plan to read it :-)

Why? I was able to do substantial changes to the kernel when I was a teenager (late 90s), mostly on my first try. There was no giant wall of abstraction I had to climb over or some huge swath of mutually interacting code I had to comprehend. There was also nothing that required fancy code navigation and the creation of something like the ctags database in order to find out what on earth was happening.

No action at a distance or lasagna style dereferencing or mysterious type names that are just typedef'd and #define'd around dozens of times back to something basic like char. No fancy obscure GNU preprocessor extensions or exotic programming patterns.

Nothing had obtuse documentation that tried my patience or required much more than enthusiasm and basic C knowledge.

I did things like got a wireless card working from code written for one with a similar chipset and got various other things like the IrDA transmitter on my laptop at the time to do a slattach and thus work as a primitive wireless network - all in the late 90s.

I likely had no idea what, say, the difference between network byte order and host byte order was at the time or how the 802.11b protocol worked or what a radiotap header was or any of that. The separation of concerns was so good however, that none of that knowledge was actually needed.

Compare that to say, the Qualcomm compatible WWAN I just dealt with over the past few weeks where I needed to have in-depth knowledge of an exhaustive number of things (very specific chipset and network details) to get a basic ipv4 address working. Then I needed to read up on GNSS technology and NMEA data to debug codes over USBmon to get the GPS from the wwan working. Then after I had the qmi kernel modules doing what I wanted and the qmi userland toolsets, I had to write some python scripts to talk to dbus to get the data from the modemmanager that I needed in order to log the GPS. All the maintainers of these pieces were very nice and helpful and I have nothing negative to say. This is just how it usually is these days.

Back then however, I wasn't a good programmer, I was likely pretty terrible in fact but with the NetBSD codebase I was able to knockout whatever I wanted every time, fast, on a 486.

I miss those days.

https://github.com/requests/requests