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

Post by bamboozled » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 3:02 AM UTC

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…

Post by nstart » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 4:02 AM UTC

tschwimmer wrote: post #55

Perhaps 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…

Post by rurban » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 5:41 AM UTC

hugofirth wrote: post #15

For a C codebase, Postgres[1] wins for me hands down. It's clean and suuuuuuper well commente, such that with a little context you can dive into something very complex and still get a feel for what is going on. [1]: https://github.com/postgres/postgres

Post by GuB-42 » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 10:27 AM UTC

mannykannot wrote: post #195

GuB-42 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't have a problem with that code. It is idiomatic C code, like *p++ or flag &= ~mask. ++i is a bit less common than i++ but nothing unusual. The lack of of error checking is more concerning though. It can be justified though, and it brings me to the next point. The comment is the worst part. It is useless, it literally repeats the most obvious part of the code. A good comment would be something like "there is no…

> The lack of of error checking is more concerning though. It can be justified though... How so, in this case? It could lead to undefined behavior. > The comment is the worst part. Useless comments may be irritating, but, as a bad practice, they are not comparable to skipping checks for possible errors and creating the possibility for undefined behavior.

  // set foo to x
  foo = x;
  // set foo to x
  bar = x;

Post by lugg » Wed, Jul 31, 2019, 3:10 PM UTC

whycombagator wrote: post #237

lugg wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not fully on board with all of Roberts views but this point about a framework for frameworks sake is one I agree with. https://youtu.be/o_TH-Y78tt4 starting at around 10:30 he gets into what I was getting at. > Whereas I'd say Laravel and it's ecosystem are far more productive and time saving than simply using just PHP. I'm not arguing a time thing. I'm arguing that a framework that forces its architecture onto y…

> Laravels architecture works for one thing: web sites. From the github repo: “Laravel is a web application framework with expressive, elegant syntax”