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A project with a single 11,000-line code file

austinhenley.com

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Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#161

Post by theobeers »

formerly_proven wrote: post #143
userbinator wrote: post #102

I remember many years ago coming across a reimplementation of the server side for a popular MMORPG of the time, reverse-engineered from the client (which was Flash) by what was likely a teenager --- it was over 100k lines in a single file, written in Visual Basic. Global variables everywhere, short names, and not even indentation. All the account data was stored in flat files, there was no actual DB. No "best practic…

It always seemed surprising to me how some of the big Oblivion and Skyrim mods would get by with fairly few bugs despite there being no way to have automated tests and some of them having 10k lines of scripting (or much more in some cases) spread around dozens or hundreds of quests (quests in the CE engine are not just the quests you as a player see, but also a huge number of invisible quests because quest state mach…

I think it makes sense. Modders get a kind of obsessive testing from their communities (including themselves) that devs in most commercial contexts couldn’t dream of. Skyrim mods are, if anything, correcting for bugs in the game.

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#162

Post by CamperBob2 »

honkycat wrote: post #70
activitypea wrote: post #54

I don't get the obsession with file length. What's the benefit of having 100 files with one 50-line function per file, over having a 5000 file with 100 functions? Obviously not counting extreme cases where the file size would break some editors' buffers

Ability to structure your code base hierarchically Ability to search through your codebase by file name Ability to hide irrelevant information and expose a higher level API through private functions

None of those are necessarily driven by file-level organization, though, except for the one about the file names themselves.

My mortgage is paid by a 50 kLoC C program with a single 11000-line function. I'm always blown away by how many so-called "code editors" can't give me a simple list of C functions in the file, the way BRIEF could in 1987.

Few things annoy me more than having to trudge through a codebase with hundreds of .c files, inevitably all with 8-character filenames. Any day when I have to break out Eclipse to navigate an unfamiliar project is an official Bad Day At Work.

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#164

Post by exdsq »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #117
userbinator wrote: post #102

I remember many years ago coming across a reimplementation of the server side for a popular MMORPG of the time, reverse-engineered from the client (which was Flash) by what was likely a teenager --- it was over 100k lines in a single file, written in Visual Basic. Global variables everywhere, short names, and not even indentation. All the account data was stored in flat files, there was no actual DB. No "best practic…

Ironically, this is a description of hacker news itself. https://github.com/shawwn/arc/blob/arc3.1/news.arc (HN has indentation, though.) It’s important to realize that this is good design. It’s hard to separate yourself from the time you live in, but the rewards are worthwhile.

The only readability issue I have with that is the functions expected arguments. Add some types and I’d be very happy to work on it. I believe Facebook uses a single directory of files now as best practice? With the file names including namespaces. That was an HN comment from ages ago so could be wrong or misinterpreted.

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#165

Post by woah »

briantkelley wrote: post #87

I worked on Word for years. Office has thousands of files over 10,000 lines with, uh, various degrees of test coverage and comprehensibility. After some time and experience, your mental model of the architecture ends up being way more important than simple metrics on source code organization. IMO, organizing source code in files seems archaic. E.g. tracing the history of a function moved across files can be tedious e…

What's an alternative to files that doesn't just have all the same attributes of files anyway? If it involves breaking code into multiple chunks of related functions, and possibly having these chunks act as namespaces, that sounds like what a file does.

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#167

Post by [deleted] »

moralestapia wrote: post #37
ben_w wrote: post #9

That beats the 1000 lines inside a single if {} block that I once found. (The conditional in that if {} always evaluated to true).

Lol, reminds me of the meme: var a = true; if(a == true) then return true; else if(a == false) then return false; Or something like that.

[deleted]

Re: A project with a single 11,000-line code file

#170

Post by 29athrowaway »

kbrannigan wrote: post #39

So afraid to write bad, spaghetti code, I ended up writing no code at all. This thread made me realize that it's better to have a working profitable project with bad code, than a perfect unfinished project, with meticulously chosen design patterns. Afraid of being judged for bad code, I could not start until I had the right architecture. I'm glad I read this. This is developers therapy.

Restaurant industry version:

    I was so afraid to cook in a dirty kitchen, I ended up not cooking at all.

    This thread made me realize that's better to sell food prepared on dirty surfaces with unrefrigerated ingredientes half-eaten by rodents and roaches that makes people sick, than fresh food prepared on clean surfaces with clean utensils.

    I'm glad I read this.

    This is a restaurant worker story.
Construction industry version:

    I was so afraid of not using the right construction materials and not building code-compliant structures, I ended up not building at all.

    This thread made me realize that's better to sell houses with structural problems and low quality materials that will be unsafe to live in, than houses built according to code.

    I'm glad I read this.

    This is a builder story.
In any other industry, a person would go to jail for saying that. You won't, because luckily for you, software development is not a regulated activity, and people with your mindset can make a happy living outside of jail. But hopefully one day some types of neglect in software development become illegal.

"Better is the enemy of the worse" is no excuse to have spaghetti code, or 50,000 lines of code files. It means that good is sometimes more convenient than perfect. Spaghetti code is not good to begin with.

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