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Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
201–210 of 278 posts
Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
#202I would say the Mattermost ("open Source slack") codebase:
Go server: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-server
React frontend app: https://github.com/mattermost/mattermost-webapp
Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
#203Any good to study Kotlin codebases? Or even Java (8+)?
Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
#204A side question. What is a good way to start understanding such code bases as mentioned on here, so that the learning is optimal and effective?
Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
#205The Windows operating system. Windows is quite an engineering achievement. We didn't prioritize readability or "clean code". All the variables used hungarian notation, so you had horrible names like lpszFileName (lpsz = long pointer to a zero terminated string) or hwndSaveButton (window handle). You also had super long if(SUCCEEDED(hr)) chains that looked like your code was spilling down a staircase. Oh yeah, and pid…
I'm mega curious about this > ...like lpszFileName (lpsz = long pointer to a zero terminated string) I remember those. AIUI hungarian gives you some kind of typing. The typing is done by humans using the names. The humans have to get it right; they are the typecheckers. The first thing I'd do is offload the typechecking onto an automatic framework - the idea of letting people do a computer's job is madness. It would…
Would whoever downvoted this please explain why. I laid out my thoughts for critiquing by others, but learn nothing unless I'm told why it's wrong.
Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
#206Perhaps 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.
I'm honestly surprised to see Hashicorp mentioned here, not because I've read their code, but because I had so many hours of tear-my-hair-out misery using their products.
I found them so under-tested and buggy that finally I just gave up. They're now blacklisted in my mind -- I'll never use one of their products again.
I guess the lesson here is that good code doesn't always have a strong relationship to a usable or bug-free product.
Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
#207NetBSD, 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.
Well there is also Unreal Engine!
Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
#208Earlier 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))…
IMO good code needs to be readable at the call site much more than the function definition. That’s why I believe in the Google C/Go style rule that all mutable parameters must be passed by pointer. A call site with &arg communicates mutability quickly. Also, in my framework designs I consider the impact on code complete heavily:
E.g. in the above sample “TS” is commented to mean timestamp but that will be lost during scans of code complete options. Also, MAX_TIMESTAMP_PRECISION may not show up in code-complete for timestamp macros/consts, but TIMESTAMP_MAX_PRECISION will.
Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
#209Anything 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…
Seconding burntsushi. I learnt the basic Rust idioms by doing the advent of code last year and comparing my solution to his.
Re: Ask HN: What are the “best” codebases that you've encountered?
#210The Windows operating system. Windows is quite an engineering achievement. We didn't prioritize readability or "clean code". All the variables used hungarian notation, so you had horrible names like lpszFileName (lpsz = long pointer to a zero terminated string) or hwndSaveButton (window handle). You also had super long if(SUCCEEDED(hr)) chains that looked like your code was spilling down a staircase. Oh yeah, and pid…
I worked on Windows for 3.5 years and hated most the code I touched:
1. I think I counted 5 string implementations in active use and code at the boundary had to convert between them all.
2. The SUCCEEDED macro is a mask against HRESULT but who the hell actually uses non-zero HRESULTS to communicate domain-specific success codes? And don’t forget that posix APIs return 0-for-non-error ints and COM APIs can use S_TRUE (0 to be a non-error) and S_FALSE (1) so you have to flip them for real bools. Or have if (bResult == S_TRUE)
3. Nobody wanted to touch old codebases. I fixed an assert in Trident layout code because a whole library used upper-left, lower-right input (and params called ul, lr) but one function (contrary to docs) used upper-left, width, & height. When I fixed the library and 2/3 call sites I was called arrogant, to revert changes in the library, and change the last 1/3 to also have the inverse bug in its call-site.
4. Another Trident API (written by an intern) had a tree where fastInsert() could only be called after slowLookup() but nothing in the api enforces this
5. Every COM object decides whether it’s faster or thread-safe by whether the refcount uses atomic ops or just —/++
6. Saw parallel arrays in files where a struct held an object which might have suffered the slicing problem in insert. Another struct field held an into the index of the sliced part array. Users rehydrated. This wouldn’t happen with an object pointer, but indirection was unacceptable because the author didn’t trust the small allocation heap’s locality.
7. My codebase included a while c++ runtime because my core-OS team didn’t trust msvcrt.dll because the shell team wrote it.