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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?

#211

Post by MagnumOpus »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #100
rsweeney21 wrote: post #86

The 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…

> So where is the flaw in my thinking

The codebase has 34 years worth of code written already, 100 million LOC or more if you count Office, VS etc. The cost of typechecking is trivial but the cost of rewriting this much code to be consistent with any new convention is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. This legacy cost then of course becomes higher every year...

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

#212

Post by inlined »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #205
tempguy9999 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I’ll save you with an upvote. Hungarian notation also helps avoid collisions that lead to confusingly similar names:

pArray (array pointer) ecArray (element count of array) bcArray (byte count of the full array)

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

#213

Post by lol768 »

lol768 wrote: post #24
bijection wrote: post #16

The Codemirror codebase [0] is simply written and richly commented, and using Codemirror itself in a project is a pleasure. Tellingly, Marijn Haverbeke, Codemirror's creator, is also the author of the excellent 'Eloquent Javascript' [1]. [0] https://github.com/codemirror/codemirror [1] http://eloquentjavascript.net/

It's unfortunate that the author doesn't appear to understand the value of a strict Content-Security-Policy.

For context, see this GitHub issue: https://github.com/codemirror/CodeMirror/issues/4937

Author is unwilling to change a handful lines of code to make the package compatible with a strict style-src.

Why does this matter? You can exfiltrate data such as CSRF tokens using inline styles from a HTML injection vulnerability: https://medium.com/bugbountywriteup/exfiltration-via-css-inj...

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

#214

Post by inlined »

holy_city wrote: post #94
cryptica wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Windows API was very ugly... not to mention unnecessarily complicated. It does not belong in this thread.

Personally, COM gives me the heebie-jeebies. I get why it exists and think it's a cool idea. Under the hood it's just RTTI across shared library boundaries, and it's cool that it "just works" with the way that compilers generate vtables from pure virtual base classes. But hell did it take me awhile to figure out how that worked because it's so poorly documented and auto-magical. Reverse engineering a COM DLL just to…

Also the whole point of COM was interface composition which led to the diamond problem (multiple inheritance) in any real C++ object that implemented two interfaces (which each had to inherit IUnknown if all implementations were to be COM compatible). Virtual inheritance was a hack fix to a platform whose primary language fought its primary purpose.

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

#216

Post by jan_g »

smt88 wrote: post #206
bamboozled wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Have you by any chance also used their Vault[0]? I'm looking at solutions for secrets management and theirs is mentioned often.

[0] https://www.vaultproject.io/

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

#217

Post by inlined »

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…

> 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.

While I agree when evaluating a codebase by the broad architecture (which I often judge by cohesion and coupling), I feel evaluating details first requires learning to read code as well as prose. Then “bad” or “ugly” code is code that reads arcanely like olde English.

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

#218

Post by inlined »

hazz99 wrote: post #162
heyoni wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the point of all these empty comments throughout the code? // ...

It's likely the Go libter requiring every public method / variable to be documented.

Yup. I saw a lot of codebases with things like:

// EnqueueEvent ...

func (q *Queue)EnqueueEvent(event Event)

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

#219

Post by holy_city »

inlined wrote: post #214
holy_city wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, COM gives me the heebie-jeebies. I get why it exists and think it's a cool idea. Under the hood it's just RTTI across shared library boundaries, and it's cool that it "just works" with the way that compilers generate vtables from pure virtual base classes. But hell did it take me awhile to figure out how that worked because it's so poorly documented and auto-magical. Reverse engineering a COM DLL just to…

Also the whole point of COM was interface composition which led to the diamond problem (multiple inheritance) in any real C++ object that implemented two interfaces (which each had to inherit IUnknown if all implementations were to be COM compatible). Virtual inheritance was a hack fix to a platform whose primary language fought its primary purpose.

True. That. I've spent a fair amount of weekend time over the last couple months working on a non-standard COM API port to Rust, and the one thing that's stuck me the most is how batshit crazy relying on virtual base classes is for an extensible API. It only works when you want users to deal with your C++ SDK, not the API itself.

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

#220

Post by lugg »

0mbre wrote: post #19
lugg wrote: post #9

I'm really curious how you see laravel as a shining example of clean code? That thing is the epitome of a framework for frameworks sake. Pretty sure Most of Martin's talks begin by complaining about this sort of thing?

A software's usefulness is not correlated to how well it was architected. What I like about Laravel is that its fairly complex code base that is mostly composed of tiny and expressive functions

I'm not sure I follow.

We're not talking usefulness here we are talking about clean code.

Architecture is not only correlated but causal in this situation.

It's over architecture is the problem. It's nano functions are a positive side effect but don't change the indirection problems you face.

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