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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?

#71

Post by holy_city »

jakewins wrote: post #31
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

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…

>the "good code is self documenting" nonsense

Man I hate dogma like that. My "common sense" comment style is always, "code tells me how, comments tell me why." The only exception is in hand optimized code where I'll non-doc comment what the reference implementation would be above the optimized version, which is _sometimes_ necessary when tests aren't in the same translation unit.

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

#72

Post by bch »

coleifer wrote: post #4

I know it's a cliche but the sqlite code is the easiest to read C I've encountered. Followed closely by the code for Redis.

Tcl/Tk is listed below by others, but it’s worth noting that both Richard Hipp (SQLite) and Antirez (redis) are (or were) very deeply involved with Tcl. I think there maybe a positive feedback loop/environment wrt engineering discipline. It’s worth exploring. I also second the praise below of John Ousterhout’s (inventor of Tcl/Tk) book “A Philosophy of Software Design”.

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

#74

Post by ashafer »

bitwize wrote: post #34

NetBSD, hands down. Beautiful, simple to understand, consistent. The documentation is also top notch -- I wrote a trivial character-device kernel driver using only the man pages as a reference. And you can too. Also -- the source code to Doom. Read it, marvel at its clarity and efficiency -- and then laugh when you realize that the recent console ports were completely rewritten in fucking Unity . And the Switch versi…

I completely agree. I've gotten to work with both of these at my summer job and it's been an absolute pleasure.

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

#76

Post by sharkjacobs »

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…

The latest version of NetNewsWire is a nice example of a modern MacOS application codebase.

https://github.com/brentsimmons/NetNewsWire

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

#77

Post by SahAssar »

freetobesmart wrote: post #18

many mature frameworks have good standards. For php you can look at any code base that adbides by PSR standards and get good code. Not only that but laravel is in a mature space where the problems are already solved. Its basically reinventing the wheel. Im not surprised that Laravel is written cleanly but I hate its API. It reminds me of the bloat of Zend but with an obnoxious artsy style added to it. Im an engineer…

> look at any code base that adbides by PSR standards and get good code.

No. PSR does not at all ensure good code, only standardized code style and some of the interfaces.

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

#80

Post by tschwimmer »

westoncb wrote: post #70
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…

It seems like that's how this question is always answered. I'd also be interested to see some good application code. Also curious about some good, not too hugely sized, game code (preferably something not written in C/C++, maybe like an indie game from the past decade or so). Anyone know something?

I almost feel like game code is a counter example. Unless you're making a massively multiplayer game, the code is throwaway because once you ship development effectively stops (or is limited for bugfixes and dlc). Would be interesting to see what the LoL or Warcraft codebase looks like though.
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