Pretty sure PostgreSQL will have a place at the top quarter of this page.
Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?
211–220 of 294 posts
Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?
#212When we take the language into consideration, unwound like to mention Redis. Often codebases written in C are a a mess to understand, a mess to read. The Redis Source Code is understandable even without deep knowledge of C
Yep. I was going to say Redis and SQLite. Both are really well commented. They almost read like a manual.
Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?
#213I like the design philosophy behind BoringSSL:
https://boringssl.googlesource.com/boringssl
If some portion of the library is overly complex, look into the use case and delete it wherever possible. It maintains a long-term bound on code complexity, which I quite like.
Edit: a nice explanation on the design philosophy here https://www.imperialviolet.org/2015/10/17/boringssl.html
Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?
#214most people are talking about clean code, good design constructs, but i feel that many are missing the point, we’re talking about code quality here, design is the grit and grind that all developers go through to develop great software, certainly there are better designed software projects out there that leaves them more maintainable and prone to less bugs, but the fact of the matter is that for complicated code, designs go through many iterations and refactorings over time e.g. linux kernel, all software projects have bugs, even well designed or well tested software. but the significance of good testing and good processes are not being highlighted here, unit testing, code coverage, functional testing, end to end testing，scale testing, performance testing, code review, fault injection, debuggability, test automation, static code analysis, etc, i am shocked not to see lots of discussion on these things (aside from the sqlite mention) and testing techniques. probably a more developer friendly crowd here at hn, but testing is a significant and game changing part of what separates developers from great developers.
Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?
#215This is not necessarily about the code, but I've been really impressed for a while by the lodash project and its maintainer's dedication to constantly keep the number of open issues at 0. Any issues get dealt with at record speed, it's quite a sight to see. https://github.com/lodash/lodash/issues
JDD, the maintainer, is also incredibly devoted and overall a nice guy to talk to. He has something like 5 years (and counting) of making a commit every single day, including weekends and holidays and sick days. They may not always be world-changing commits, but it still shows an incredible amount of dedication
Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?
#216I'm a bit surprised nobody mentioned qmail yet: https://cr.yp.to/qmail.html
qmail cheats a bit because it's so simple, that most people end up using something with messy code on top. Not that I don't think it's a sound engineering decision but when comparing it's code cleanliness with other SMTP stacks it needs to be mentioned.
Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a lot to admire in OpenBSD but sometimes the peripheral tools they deliver don't work well. The example I know best is OpenNTPD (last link in your comment). It has a bunch of problems, including relatively poor clock discipline compared to other NTP implementations. And it doesn't even try to handle leap seconds. That causes problems on the machine itself which may or may not matter to you, but it's catastrop…
This is seriously bad, but I do get why they thought OpenNTPd was necessary (bad/perfectible code in the other implementations). Maybe I'll check that at home (where I replaced FreeBSD's ntpd with OpenNTPd).
Yeah the stock old ntpd had a lot of unused code and various security problems over the years. It makes sense OpenBSD would replace it. Just a shame they didn't do it completely. I think that describes a lot of OpenBSD tools; you're trading off some functionality for very good security.
There are better NTP implementations now. Chrony is great, it's the default in Ubuntu now. NTPsec is coming along although I haven't tried to use it myself. Also good ol' ntpd is greatly improved.
Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?
#218As far as C++ code goes, the Lean Prover is really well maintained: https://github.com/leanprover/lean
I'd also say GHC is quite good.
And Pandoc as well.
I don't think I can compute enough variables to consider the "highest" though... so the aforementioned are only examples of what I think are good.
Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?
#219Its older than some HN posters, but the GPLed DOOM source code was one I liked. The performance reached by the game was considered impossible until Carmack did show us otherwise. So I expected lots of ASM and weird hacks, especially as compiler optimization wasnt as good as it is today. Surprise, surprise, the thing was easy to read, easy to get going, easy to port, reasonablye documented . It has shown me what a goo…
FYI, "Surprise, surprise" is generally meant sarcastically. I think you mean "Surprisingly". https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/surprise,%20surpr...
I can speak English! I learn it from a book!
Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?
#220OpenBSD and Co. (OpenSSH, etc.) * https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/ * https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/ssh/ * https://www.libressl.org/ * https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/usr.sbin/ntpd/
for sure not. OpenBSD makes no attempt to use proper performance which is critical for a kernel. there are so many naive ad-hoc data structures and algos, it's a shame to walkthrough.
OpenBSD's niche is security -- that's the point.