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Reading OpenBSD source code daily

blog.tintagel.pl

41–50 of 86 posts

Re: Reading OpenBSD source code daily

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works on Android 6.0.1 w/Firefox nightly for developers app.

Okay, good to know. I just tried on two devices. Nexus 5X, Android 7.1.2, Firefox 53.0.2 Samsung Galaxy Tab S3, Android 7.0, Firefox 53.0.2 The page loads and I get that little blue loading indicator but then nothing happens.

Thanks for the report. We'll fix this asap.

Re: Reading OpenBSD source code daily

#42

I love this idea in part because it's the very opposite of the way I tend to work, which is to drive very hard to get a surface understanding of a thing in order to make a very targeted change. I learn lots along the way with this approach, but don't often get the deep, wholistic understanding of existing systems that only comes with repeated exposure over a long time. Some kinds of understanding involve a no shortcu…

I have the same problem, and I'm striving to overcome it. I'm excellent at gaining surface level knowledge quickly, deep knowledge requires much more discipline - and I struggle with how to do it, as I don't have a good strategy for that kind of learning.

Re: Reading OpenBSD source code daily

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to improve your C knowledge there are probably more efficient ways to do it instead of randomly reading OpenBSD sources such as reading more advanced C books or reading source codes of projects which are known for their good code quality (sqlite maybe?). One of problem of static source code analyzers are false positive. Soon or later you will have to reading code and understand the context. I assume it's…

> more efficient ways to do it instead of randomly reading OpenBSD sources such as reading source codes of projects which are known for their good code quality Yes they could be reading the source of projects known for their code quality… > OpenSSL is not an OpenBSD project and the code quality is markedly different :-)[…] and yes, OpenSSL is a bit of a code quality difference than the OpenBSD norm. [nb: these commen…

Ok. Could you give me the sources of these quotes? Or other reputable sources and papers who claim that the code quality of OpenBSD is high?

Re: Reading OpenBSD source code daily

#44
post #6

Great idea. What other code bases are there that lend themselves to this? Some kind of curated genius.com for source code would be interesting.

If you're into Python, the Flask source is just awesome. I've learned a lot from that code.

Re: Reading OpenBSD source code daily

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> more efficient ways to do it instead of randomly reading OpenBSD sources such as reading source codes of projects which are known for their good code quality Yes they could be reading the source of projects known for their code quality… > OpenSSL is not an OpenBSD project and the code quality is markedly different :-)[…] and yes, OpenSSL is a bit of a code quality difference than the OpenBSD norm. [nb: these commen…

Ok. Could you give me the sources of these quotes? Or other reputable sources and papers who claim that the code quality of OpenBSD is high?

Code quality is hard to measure, but I think that any competent C programmer that reads the source code for OpenBSD will agree that the quality is above average.

OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD, another project considered to have above average quality source code. Enough so that Spinellis based his book about code reading on the NetBSD source code.

Re: Reading OpenBSD source code daily

#46

I love this idea in part because it's the very opposite of the way I tend to work, which is to drive very hard to get a surface understanding of a thing in order to make a very targeted change. I learn lots along the way with this approach, but don't often get the deep, wholistic understanding of existing systems that only comes with repeated exposure over a long time. Some kinds of understanding involve a no shortcu…

> but don't often get the deep, wholistic understanding

*holistic

Re: Reading OpenBSD source code daily

#47
post #3

I wonder where best to start for people who haven't taken an OS class before?

That depends on what you want to learn.

If you want to improve your code reading skills and/or C programming skills, then you can probably go ahead and start reading, for example, the OpenBSD source code, even though you don't have any operating systems knowledge.

Re: Reading OpenBSD source code daily

#48
post #29
post #6

Great idea. What other code bases are there that lend themselves to this? Some kind of curated genius.com for source code would be interesting.

The D standard library's Algorithms and ranges are nice. Realistically, most production code for things people depend on is quite well done: e.g. LLVM is pretty easy to read. Opposite of this: STL implementations come to mind.

Libc++ is quite readable. Libstdc++, not as much.

I've recently hit more than 5 stacked bugs in older version of libstdc++ on bionic libc...

Re: Reading OpenBSD source code daily

#50
post #31

Completely agree. But the tools don't make this very easy. Back in college I was working on patches to OpenSSL, Chrome, Firefox, Apache, etc., to add support for TLS-SRP, and it was a huge pain to jump into these massive codebases and try to understand them. I was using Emacs and had all of the various language support modes configured, but go-to-definition and cross-references barely worked. Searching was slow, and…

Just some honest feedback on your pricing that's hopefully helpful: Your Enterprise plan is at least an order of magnitude more expensive than what many organizations would pay for something like this.

E.g. a Jira license for 2000 people costs $24,000 yearly[1], licensing this for the same amount of users would be $1,200,000.

This is way more than organizations of that size tend to pay for top-tier support contracts for software that's critical to business continuity.

Pricing per-user without any advertised discounts is also a trap if you're selling to large organizations. A lot of them tend to, for simplicity's sake, want to just give everyone in the org access to a tool like this, but only 5-10% of the workforce might be using it, but due to how you're pricing it there's no way it's going to be bought in the first place.

1. https://www.atlassian.com/licensing/jira-software

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