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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?

#241

Post by dwild »

tln wrote: post #108
dwild wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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." With only the name, how would you know how many decimal places? The comment isn't wrong/out of date here btw.

> With only the name, how would you know how many decimal places

I'm not saying the name is wrong because of the comment, I'm saying it's wrong because of the usage of the acronym.

> The comment isn't wrong/out of date here btw.

Isn't wrong? How? It's true in the sense that they expect TS_PREC_INV to be related to MAX_TIMESTAMP_PRECISION (which would be a perfect example to my mind of a needed comment, if actually it was a requirement), but it's actually false in the sense that it's not what that code does.

You wouldn't get a different rounding if you were to modify MAX_TIMESTAMP_PRECISION, which is what you would expect based on that comment.

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

#242

Post by smt88 »

jan_g wrote: post #216
smt88 wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

I haven't and am not sure whom the target audience is exactly.

Azure and AWS have secrets management, and most stacks have some open-source way to do it if you're the roll-your-own-server type.

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

#244

Post by anarazel »

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))…

It's like in any sizable codebase with quite some history. There's substantial difference in quality between parts. Some of the worst parts go back to the early days of postgres - the priorities and resources available back then were just very different than today. Obviously there's also noticeable differences in more recent code, but I don't think to the same degree (although there've been definitely subsystems that worked out better and some that worked out worse).

E.g. the code above is essentially (although somewhat mechanically renamed and moved since), from:

   commit 41f1f5b76ad8e177a2b19116cbf41384f93f3851
   Author: Thomas G. Lockhart 
   Date:   2000-02-16 17:26:26 +0000

       Implement "date/time grand unification".
> Usage of acronyms is one of the worst offenders in bad code.

Not really on board with that... It's a balance. Brevity does have it's value too. Everybody is going to understand that TS stands for timestamp, that WAL stands for write ahead log, etc. Especially when dealing with a language that doesn't have namespaces etc, you're going to have to realistically deal with prefixes a good bit. There's plenty of bad abbreviations in postgres code, however, don't get me wrong.

In the above I'm more bothered by the inconsistent naming, which I think is probably one postgres' bigger code quality issues.

> For me, comments should only be needed when something isn't clear.

I pretty strongly disagree. Most of the time comments shouldn't explicitly restate all that code is doing, sure (although there's clearly exceptions to that too). But e.g. stating why an algorithm is doing something, what the higher level goals of some checks are, why some shortcut is reasonable all make a code base a lot more maintainable in the medium to long run.

I work a lot on postres, and occasionally dabble around the corners of linux. For me it's the* defining difference making it much more painful to understand most linux subsystems.

Edit: formatting, typo

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

#245

Post by anarazel »

dwild wrote: post #240
coldtea wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

> TS is a very common abbreviation of timestamp. Common != universal. It's known up until someone doesn't know it. We have pretty powerful autocompletes, let use them instead, or just lose 3 seconds writing the 10 letters, it won't be so bad. > And you would still need to know the decimal places. Sure, by reading the code and understanding what it does and how it does it. You change a constant that will affect that c…

> > TS is a very common abbreviation of timestamp.

> Common != universal. It's known up until someone doesn't know it. We have pretty powerful autocompletes, let use them instead, or just lose 3 seconds writing the 10 letters, it won't be so bad.

The cost of that compounds though. There's plenty times where there is not just one abbreviation in a symbol name, but multiples. And pretty soon the "logical" lines long enough to contain multiple references to such symbols get considerably slower to read (be it due to long lines, or being broken up into multiple lines).

I've an extremely hard time to believe that the widespread use of ts, xact, wal, ... is a significant factor in how quickly somebody can get started with the postgres code base.

> > The real issue is that it's based on TS_PREC_INV and not MAX_TIMESTAMP_PRECISION as per the comment

> Which is bound to happen when your documentation isn't the code directly.

Hm? Those aren't out of sync? TS_PREV_INC is the relevant factor/divisor to round to MAX_TIMESTAMP_PRECISION here. It'd be nicer if that were explicit in the code by defining TS_PREV_INC based on MAX_TIMESTAMP_PRECISION, sure, but they're in sync. It's just not that trivial to state in C. But they're in sync. Note also that TS_PREC_INV really is just an implementation detail for TSROUND(), it's not used elsewhere. These days we'd just write this in an static inline function, in all likelihood.

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

#246

Post by anarazel »

h0bzii wrote: post #42
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…

/* don't even try to load if not enabled */ if (!jit_enabled) return false; I still think comments like these are super redundant and annoying.

Heh, that's one of mine. The point isn't so much to restate the if itself, it's to explain that we're explicitly testing before loading the JIT provider - which happens immediately below.

Which in turn is because we a) do not want a hard dependency on any JIT provider, in particular we don't want a hard dependency on LLVM b) LLVM is a really slow to load dependency. Those bits are expanded more upon in the README in the same directory.

Edit: expand.

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

#247

Post by quadcore »

0mbre wrote: post #223
quadcore wrote: post #117

it seems that in real life, a really high-quality codebase is hard to come by I think a common misconception amongst mid-experienced programmers is that they confuse look with quality. Reading clean written code gives you a feeling of control and also the feeling that someone must have thought about that program. It's reassuring. You have in front of you a code that gives you trust. When in fact, that code can be com…

I'd be curious to see an example of code that looks bad but yet is easy to grasp mentally. I do think these 2 features that you describe "easy to run mentally" and "look good" are correlated.

At least, I may agree with the following: bad program infers bad presentation but bad presentation does not infer bad program.

In my career, I've seen many times peer programmers laugh at me when looking at my code and subsequently keep laughing, but in the other direction, as we were rolling over our competitors. Once, at a FANG, I've had the perfect setup where our team was doing the same project than another team. We did it in 12 month with 8 people, it took them 4 years with 18. Both projects started from scratch.

Follows an example of code of my own. This is the perfect example because it looks like complete utter garbage and you will think I'm a beginner and I've never seen any good designed code. You are gonna laugh. While it is certainly not flawless, I'm pretty sure you would like to be on my team with that code if you'd knew more. All the features, to the tiniest nice subtlety are there, it has almost no bug and it's dead simple. Really dead simple. Please note that I code with sublime text which has multi cursor making duplicated code not so bad. So there is a lot of duplicated code. Again, I'm not saying the following code is flawless, I'm saying that despite its flaws, or even because of them, from my experience you'd prefer to be in my team.

https://github.com/IndieRobert/example_code/blob/master/src/...

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

#248

Post by jakewins »

dwild wrote: post #238
jakewins wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mostly agree with this. Though as I wrote that sentence I realized Go has somewhat softened my position on abbreviations. I think the "note" portion is useful; ultimately a test would stop you breaking that secondary use, but the comment stops you spending time in that direction in the first place. But either way, overall I think you're right this would be fine without a comment. I'm thinking more of examples like…

That comment is exactly what I mean by when needed. That does confirm that they are making pretty amazing code. I would have much prefered to get that file instead of the other one :P. They do have a redundant comment at someplace but it's clearly a tiny minority and they aren't losing any one time.

Yep, I think we're in agreement :)

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

#249

Post by sixstringtheory »

akaralar wrote: post #235
sixstringtheory wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Came here to post this. It's got some interesting usage of custom Swift operators to create almost diagrammatic code, like here: https://github.com/kickstarter/ios-oss/blob/master/Kickstart... _ = self.cardholderNameTextField |> formFieldStyle |> cardholderNameTextFieldStyle |> \.accessibilityLabel .~ self.cardholderNameLabel.text And it's the first iOS codebase I've seen that puts test files right next to the files…

2 of the guys that worked on that app are doing video series about functional programming now where they talk a lot about the ideas in the app, https://www.pointfree.co

Nice rec! They're the ones that wrote the tagged [0] repo I use, had no idea they were connected. Very cool.

[0]: https://github.com/pointfreeco/swift-tagged

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

#250

Post by AtlasBarfed »

ThisIs_MyName wrote: post #192
Izkata wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by running it in your head. I have encountered far too many people who don't even realize this is a thing. I figure they must be doing it in some limited form and just aren't recognizing it as a skill that can be trained up, otherwise I'm not sure how they can do any development, but...

Running non-trivial code in your head is far too tedious for daily use. I'd much rather add debug checks for invariants when I want to confirm that the code works the way I expect it to.

The human brain has, what, about 7 registers in medium term memory?
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