Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#521

Post by Juliate » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 1:47 PM UTC

pocketprotector wrote: post #394

oraguy wrote: post #18

Oracle Database 12.2. It is close to 25 million lines of C code. What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap. Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousand…

I am a current Oracle employee and blame a lot of the mistakes on the overseas development team in india. They are (not all but enough to matter) terrible programmers, but hey when you can throw 10 Indian programmers at a problem for the cost of one American... You can blame your blated mismanaged code base on their management over there. This is likely do to the attrition and generally less talented and less autonom…

Actually, you can blame this to Oracle top management (especially in a company structured as Oracle is): they called the shots, from day 1.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#522

Post by p0nce » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 1:54 PM UTC

forthy wrote: post #498

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've violated the terms of service of Oracle Database by insinuating the codebase quality is in any way not superior to any and all competitors. No benchmarks or comparisons may be performed on the Oracle Database Product under threat of grave bodily harm at the discretion of our very depraved CEO.

I doubt the competition (e.g. IBM or Microsoft) has any better code quality. Even PostgreSQL is 1.3M lines of code, so let's get something deliberately written for simplicity. SQLite is just 130k SLoC, so another order of magnitude simpler. And yet, even SQLite has an awful amount of test cases. https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html

It's because software LOC scales linerarly with the amount of man-months spent: a testament to the unique ability of our species to create beautiful, abstract designs that will stand the test of time.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#523

Post by jeltz » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 1:57 PM UTC

forthy wrote: post #498

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've violated the terms of service of Oracle Database by insinuating the codebase quality is in any way not superior to any and all competitors. No benchmarks or comparisons may be performed on the Oracle Database Product under threat of grave bodily harm at the discretion of our very depraved CEO.

I doubt the competition (e.g. IBM or Microsoft) has any better code quality. Even PostgreSQL is 1.3M lines of code, so let's get something deliberately written for simplicity. SQLite is just 130k SLoC, so another order of magnitude simpler. And yet, even SQLite has an awful amount of test cases. https://www.sqlite.org/testing.html

PostgreSQL has a lot of code but most parts of the code base have pretty high quality code. The main exceptions are some contrib modules, but those are mostly isolated from the main code base.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#524

Post by dwisehart » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 2:13 PM UTC

oraguy wrote: post #18

Oracle Database 12.2. It is close to 25 million lines of C code. What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap. Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousand…

So I think the interesting question is: when you run into a large, bloated, unwieldy POS codebase, how do you fix it? You obviously need some buy-in from management, but you also need a plan that doesn't start with "stop what we are doing and get everyone to spend all of their time rewriting what we have" or "hire a ton of new devs."

I have seen smaller versions of what the OP describes. My plan was that every new piece of code that was checked in had to meet certain guidelines for clarity--like can the dev sitting next to you understand it with little to no introduction--and particularly knotty pieces of existing code deserved a bug report just to rewrite and untangle the knots.

In the end, whatever your plan, I think what you need is a cultural change, and cultures are notoriously difficult to change. Any cultural change is going to have to start high up in the organization with the realization that the codebase is an unsustainable POS.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#525

Post by p0nce » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 2:16 PM UTC

ternaryoperator wrote: post #479

api wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code like this makes me think of the famous line from the film version of Hellraiser: "I have such sights to show you..." Contrast PostgreSQL or... uhh... virtually any other database. Oracle's mess is clearly a result of bad management, not a reflection of the intrinsic difficulty of the problem domain.

Nonsense. The problem domain you dismiss is hideously complicated. Oracle DB and PostgreSQL are entirely different classes of products. No airline runs its reservation system on PostreSQL. That's not a coincidence.

> The problem domain you dismiss is hideously complicated.

https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-biggest-codebases-in-his...

Size of software reflects the number of people working on it (and for how long), not essential complexity.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#526

Post by kaybe » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 2:37 PM UTC

wcarss wrote: post #10

Years ago as an intern at Microsoft, I had code go into the Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, and shared Office code. Excel is an incomprehensible maze of #defines and macros, PowerPoint is a Golden Temple of overly-object-oriented insanity, and Word is just so old and brittle you'd expect it to turn to dust by committing. There are "don't touch this!"-like messages left near the main loop _since roughly 1990_. I had…

Can you guess what happened here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15745250 ?

It appeared that a bug in an office component was fixed with manually binary editing. Is that probable?

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#527

Post by 9question1 » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 2:48 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #509

karulont wrote: post #503

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess that is just because SQL as a standard is not coherent nor something beatifully designed. SQL is mashup of vendor specific features all bashed togehter into one standard.

There's also a lot of essential complexity there. SQL provides, in essence, a generic interface for entering and analyzing data. Imagine the number of ways to structure and analyze data. Now square that number to get the number of two tests for how two basic features of the language interact with each other. And that's not even near full test coverage.

Your point about essential complexity is absolutely correct, but your faux mathematical analysis is totally not a legit way to analyze the complexity of something or determine test coverage. I feel like as programmers we should be comfortable making sensible statements without making up shady pseudo-math to sound convincing.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#528

Post by mdavid626 » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 2:50 PM UTC

ternaryoperator wrote: post #479

api wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code like this makes me think of the famous line from the film version of Hellraiser: "I have such sights to show you..." Contrast PostgreSQL or... uhh... virtually any other database. Oracle's mess is clearly a result of bad management, not a reflection of the intrinsic difficulty of the problem domain.

Nonsense. The problem domain you dismiss is hideously complicated. Oracle DB and PostgreSQL are entirely different classes of products. No airline runs its reservation system on PostreSQL. That's not a coincidence.

This is interesting, could you elaborate?

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#529

Post by chocks » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 2:51 PM UTC

oraguy wrote: post #18

Oracle Database 12.2. It is close to 25 million lines of C code. What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap. Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousand…

I had a very similar experience in another enterprise storage company with a code base of ~6M loc of C/C++ and gazillion test cases. Originally, it used to take roughly about an hour to just build the system where it did a bunch of compile time checks, linting etc. Then if everything goes well, it goes to code review, then to a set of hourly and nightly integration checks before it gets merged to the main branch. It would take another cool 3-4 months of QA regression cycle before it gets to the final build.

Re: Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

#530

Post by Dash83 » Thu, Nov 15, 2018, 3:21 PM UTC

oraguy wrote: post #18

Oracle Database 12.2. It is close to 25 million lines of C code. What an unimaginable horror! You can't change a single line of code in the product without breaking 1000s of existing tests. Generations of programmers have worked on that code under difficult deadlines and filled the code with all kinds of crap. Very complex pieces of logic, memory management, context switching, etc. are all held together with thousand…

Sweet-merciful Jesus. You just made me experience Vietnam-style flashbacks. I worked at Oracle for the 12.1 and 12.2 releases (not working there anymore). You just described my day to day tenure at Oracle. Thank god that's done.