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

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

#91

Post by teyc » Mon, Jul 29, 2019, 9:14 PM UTC

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.

Comments are usually less prone to logic bugs. When fixing issues, if the code behaves opposite to what the comment says, it can be a very helpful clue.

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

#92

Post by mehrdadn » Mon, Jul 29, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

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?

For C, how about ReactOS?

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

#93

Post by mehrdadn » Mon, Jul 29, 2019, 9:20 PM UTC

ekidd wrote: post #39

Anything by burntsushi, but especially xsv and ripgrep: xsv: https://github.com/BurntSushi/xsv ripgrep: https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep His code typically has extensive tests, helpful comments, and logical structure. It was fun trying to imitate his style when writing a PR for xsv. The Quake 2 engine was also pretty interesting: It was almost totally undocumented, and it had plenty of weird things going on. But…

Note: this assumes you speak Rust...

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

#94

Post by holy_city » Mon, Jul 29, 2019, 9:22 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #88

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…

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 find out how the hell it has a stable ABI is not fun.

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

#95

Post by mehrdadn » Mon, Jul 29, 2019, 9:22 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #88

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…

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

Some parts are ugly, some are beautiful. You can't really lump it into one bucket.

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

#96

Post by ts4z » Mon, Jul 29, 2019, 9:24 PM UTC

In 2010, the nginx source was quite startling. It's very readable C, but also somewhat difficult in that it did not mechanize a lot of bookkeeping. If it wanted to construct a string of 8 components, there were 8 components in getting the length right, then 8 adds to the string. This was toil, and error-prone. But it was always done with such precision, and so consistent, that it was still quite beautiful.

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

#97

Post by sixstringtheory » Mon, Jul 29, 2019, 9:31 PM UTC

jatsek wrote: post #67

I’m only learning Swift and iOS dev but a fair amount of people recommended me to take a deeper look into Kickstarter for iOS app: https://github.com/kickstarter/ios-oss

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 that define the things being tested. It's all there together.

Tons of other goodies to find.

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

#98

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 29, 2019, 9:31 PM 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

[deleted]

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

#99

Post by c-smile » Mon, Jul 29, 2019, 9:34 PM UTC

cryptica wrote: post #88

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…

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

I have quite opposite opinion backed by real life experience.

As an author of Sciter Engine that works on Windows, MacOS and Linux/GTK I have first hand experience working with all three API sets.

Windows API is the most logical, complete and stable API among all others.

It has everything that you really need to create performant and manageable UI.

MacOS is good but less good. It uses reference counting (which is not bad by itself) but in very strange manner. Name of the function determines need of [obj retain] / [obj release] and not all names that they use are consistent in that respect. Yet Apple changes API quite frequently and dramatically.

GTK, while is built on top of quite reliable Glib foundation is a mess to be honest. You have GtkWindow and GdkWindow, you have gtk_window_resize(), gtk_window_set_default_size() and 6 more functions that should allow to set size of the window but they may or may not work in particular situations.

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

#100

Post by tempguy9999 » Mon, Jul 29, 2019, 9:37 PM UTC

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 not have been too hard to do (relatively very cheap for a large codebase like an OS), I think, and would have allowed the hungarian prefixes to be dropped because they'd become redundant, and strengthened and speeded up typechecking. So where is the flaw in my thinking?

(aside: one of my first contract jobs was working in pascal (delphi actually). The company I worked for had coding standards cos you need standards, don't you. It was to prefix every integer with i_, every float with f_, every int array with ai_, et cetera. As pascal was strongly typed this was totally pointless).