Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

#61

Post by TeMPOraL » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 9:38 AM UTC

tzury wrote: post #40

SQLite. and for this reason alone! https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html As of version 3.23.0 (2018-04-02), the SQLite library consists of approximately 128.9 KSLOC of C code. (KSLOC means thousands of "Source Lines Of Code" or, in other words, lines of code excluding blank lines and comments.) By comparison, the project has 711 times as much test code and test scripts - 91772.0 KSLOC.

Tangent: I always thought SLOC means "significant lines of code". Since "code" is a shortand for "source code", expanding SLOC as "source lines of [source] code" makes little sense, IMO.

Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

#62

Post by charlchi » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 9:39 AM UTC

itsoggy wrote: post #8

The Quake 3 source was fairly good...

As a C beginner getting into writing larger projects, especially in that sort of context, the quake source has been my reference on how to structure my code.

Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

#63

Post by raverbashing » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 9:40 AM UTC

Daviey wrote: post #54

tzury wrote: post #40

SQLite. and for this reason alone! https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html As of version 3.23.0 (2018-04-02), the SQLite library consists of approximately 128.9 KSLOC of C code. (KSLOC means thousands of "Source Lines Of Code" or, in other words, lines of code excluding blank lines and comments.) By comparison, the project has 711 times as much test code and test scripts - 91772.0 KSLOC.

Inversely, this is counteracted by the logic to not use Git: https://sqlite.org/whynotgit.html

But to be honest, this is mostly fair criticism. Not sure why they need some of those things, but if they need it, then it's fine.

Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

#64

Post by batteryhorse » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 9:41 AM UTC

I was going to say the GNU version of /bin/false and /bin/true, but I actually took a look at the source and it is terrible.

Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

#65

Post by vnorilo » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 9:47 AM UTC

daniel-levin wrote: post #58

LLVM and associated projects such as clang. Bazel is good too. OkHttp and Retrofit by Square.

LLVM is remarkable; the domain is both difficult and critical. Still, the code is consistent enough that I can often guess how things work based on what I think would be reasonable!

Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

#66

Post by panic » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 9:48 AM UTC

batteryhorse wrote: post #64

I was going to say the GNU version of /bin/false and /bin/true, but I actually took a look at the source and it is terrible.

The original /bin/true is probably the highest quality code ever written, but unfortunately I don’t think the license is OSI approved: http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/%3B-)/ATT_Copyright_true.html

Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

#67

Post by stevekemp » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 9:49 AM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #2

Dolphin Emulator https://dolphin-emu.org/

I've never installed it, or read the code, but their progress-report writeups are fascinating to me.

e.g. The most recent https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2018/09/01/dolphin-progress-rep...

Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

#68

Post by bsandert » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 9:50 AM UTC

This 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

Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

#69

Post by hyperpallium » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 9:53 AM UTC

Just wanted to mention some bias in successful open source projects: they are often structured as a number of similar plug-in pieces, like youtube-dl for different video publishers.

This is great for open source, because you can easily discover and navigate to the part you want, and change it. You might need to understand the plugin interface - or you might not. This flat architecture makes it easy for people to contribute, an important aspect of a successful open source project.

But it's not the ideal architecture for every project. In some cases, a cleverer, harder to understand approach is more elegant, shorter, more efficient, simpler.

Of course... one might argue that ease of understanding is more important than anything else.

Re: Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?

#70

Post by Theodores » Fri, Sep 21, 2018, 9:55 AM UTC

The open source code I know from web development has to be fixed with various hacks - PHP and the frontend javascript that goes with it. Therefore the code I know is not 'highest code quality'. If it was 'highest code quality' then I would not know the code.

Therefore the highest code quality is likely to be in projects where I do not have to go under the hood, e.g. the Chromium project where all contributors are vastly more educated and capable than myself.