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Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

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Re: Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

#112
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure you can actually see the kernel outside the base OS team at Microsoft, or under a unique license. it is not included in MSDN or the DDK. Having worked on that team and having seen it for myself, it is truly elegant, concise, and very well written. I myself never touched it, and that is for the best. I probably wrote some of the crappy drivers for which you hold so much contempt.

You can get the Windows Research Kernel through the MSDNAA (which most major universities should be hooked up to). The WRK has all the good stuff

Agreed, but slamming Dave Cutler's work on the NT kernel, as huhtenberg did, sounds more like trolling than anything else to me. (Regardless of your opinion of Microsoft.)

Re: Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

#114
post #106
post #31

One project I found fascinating reading a while back when I was working on graphics, is AGG. It's a vector graphics toolkit, a bit like Cairo, Quartz 2D or Java 2D. It uses a particular style of C++ - a mixture of template programming together with regular polymorphism - to build up a collection of rendering components. The components are almost Unix-like - you plug them together to build your customized rendering pi…

http://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/painter_and_how_agg_wo... http://bit.ly/131cxL (.doc file) those help. if you can figure out the source code without the documentation at the agg site + those files, more power to you. but basically you are nuts.

Thanks for the links, I've never seen those before. I read the agg code without the docs, but it would have been difficult without the example programs. The docs definitely help when looking at some of the algorithms though. I remember spending a good day or two staring at the anti-aliasing code, together with the freetype rasterizer (on which it was based), trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Then in just clicked.

Re: Ask HN: What source code is worth studying?

#117
i will say unless you plan to make small changes, you wont get much out of studying the source code. fixing small bugs in an open source project will expose you to lot of portions of source code and also give you some rep in case you want to become a contributor later
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