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You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?

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Re: You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?

#341

Post by keepamovin »

mst wrote: post #320
keepamovin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah you need to cultivate those relationships. But with a willing partner that first session will take you from 0 to 1 :)

A lot of the time it takes you from 0 to 0.1, but (a) every little helps (b) if you take them out for lunch or a post-work beer or whatever it can build a relationship where you can ask follow up questions via email. Ideal is if they have a life such that something morally equivalent to "how about we meet up and I'll pay for the food/beer" is a viable thing to suggest later. Oh, and always remember - the way to a gee…

Yeah, that's a good point. But I think more often it's closer to 1 because (I guess this depends on our definition of 0 and 1 haha! :)) a) you get the benefit of their conceptual models for thinking about the codebase, which is hard won and highly useful, and b) you grok any practical pitfalls or things to remember when running, building, testing, that may be simple enough, but in the space of all possibilities are hard to come by without knowing them.

So basically you get to go from: 0 - can do nothing at all; to 1 - being able to feel confident diving in and looking around, framed with the downloaded conceptual models, knowing how to hit the ground trotting, if not running.

To me, 0.1 is more like you slugged it out for a couple hours poking around by yourself, and now you know a handful of confusing things with low confidence.

Chatting to one who has been there, done that lets you have more confidence, and know more actionable stuff, which is highly useful. I suppose it depends on your conversation, listening and comprehension skills tho! Hahaha! :)

But seriously not everybody learns well in that situation. I just happen to. I'd much rather talk it over with someone and absorb, than watch a video or read a tutorial.

Finally -- haha! :) -- I guess there are some geeks to whose schedule the way is through their husband or whatevs haha! :)

Re: You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?

#342

Post by BobbyTables2 »

d_sem wrote: post #146
sk11001 wrote: post #29

Is it worth getting more into C++ in 2024? Lots of interesting jobs in finance require it but it seems almost impossible to get hired without prior experience (with C++ and in finance).

Depends on the industry you are interested in entering. My myopic view of the world has seen the general trend from C to C++ for realtime embedded applications. For example: in the Automotive Industry all the interesting automotive features are written in C++.

Great, now they can all inherit from “HopeIDontCrashToday”

Re: You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?

#343

Post by danlugo92 »

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #240
zer00eyz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> It's a nice idea, but it's hard to do. One person is using VIM, another is using emacs, another is using QTCreator, another primarily edits in VSCode.. Trying to get everyone on the same page about all this is very, very hard. This is what's wrong with our industry, and it's no longer an acceptable answer. We're supposed to be fucking professional, and if a job needs to build a tool chain from the IDE up we need t…

> every single carpenter in the world should use the exact same make and model of saw, for, uh, professionalism reasons

Actually yes they should

Re: You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?

#344

Post by danlugo92 »

saagarjha wrote: post #247
selfmodruntime wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a nice idea, but it's hard to do. One person is using VIM, another is using emacs, another is using QTCreator, another primarily edits in VSCode.. Trying to get everyone on the same page about all this is very, very hard. I must have missed the memo where I could just say no to basic things my boss requires of me. You know, the guy that pays my salary.

As others have mentioned, none of these things actually change your development workflow. But if they did, you do have the ability to say no. If your boss fails to understand that you have an environment that you're productive in, that sounds like a bad place to work.

yikes

Re: You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?

#345

Post by rcxdude »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #110
Night_Thastus wrote: post #16

>worry not, by adding std::cmake to the standard library and you’ll see how it’s absolutely a game changer I'm pretty sure my stomach did somersaults on that. But as for the advice: >Get out the chainsaw and rip out everything that’s not absolutely required to provide the features your company/open source project is advertising and selling I hear you, but this is incredibly dangerous. Might as well take that chainsaw…

> It's a nice idea, but it's hard to do. One person is using VIM, another is using emacs, another is using QTCreator, another primarily edits in VSCode.. Trying to get everyone on the same page about all this is very, very hard. I must have missed the memo where I could just say no to basic things my boss requires of me. You know, the guy that pays my salary.

You can, in fact, just do that. You are allowed. You may get fired if you are too much of a headache, but employers are actually flexible.

Re: You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?

#346

Post by shrimp_emoji »

sylware wrote: post #321
shrimp_emoji wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That just ports all the problems to C... You're better off incrementally rewriting it in modern C++. Replace those raw pointers with references or smart pointers!

... but you only need a C compiler, not a grotesquely and absurdely massive and complex c++ compiler. This is all wrong.

What, are you building the compiler yourself? :x It'll be way worse than those grotesquely and absurdly massive and complex compilers.

Re: You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?

#347

Post by cratermoon »

eropple wrote: post #312
cratermoon wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conversely, and organization that imposes arbitrary choices and isn't capable of allowing people do use the tools they know best probably doesn't attract the best people. There are many different kinds of hammers, and making everyone who uses hammers use the same kind is, to say the least, counter productive.

I get where you're coming from, but frankly: nah. If you are so in-the-rut that you can't switch, say, text editors or IDEs and are compelled to have an Incredibly Normal Day about it, you're probably not actually possessed of the plasticity to be somebody I want to work with. I use vim, IntelliJ, Visual Studio, and VSCode at least once every two weeks apiece, and it's no skin off my back to switch. Do thou likewise.

I absolutely agree with this. The plasticity is valuable, but everyone has a productivity sweet spot, and developers tend to go where they feel most productive and rewarded for that productivity.

Re: You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?

#348

Post by keepamovin »

GuB-42 wrote: post #30
keepamovin wrote: post #3

It's funny. My first step would be 0. You reach out to the previous maintainers, visit them, buy them tea/beer and chat (eventually) about the codebase. Learned Wizards will teach you much. But I didn't see that anywhere. I think the rest of the suggestions (like get it running across platform, get tests passing) are useful stress tests likely to lead you to robustness and understanding however. But I'd def be going…

I wouldn't make it the first step. If you do, you will probably waste their time more than anything. Try to work on it a little bit first, and once you get stuck in various places, now you can talk to the previous maintainers, it will be much more productive. They will also appreciate the effort.

While this sounds good, it sort of assumes you're trying to solve some puzzle, and you're going to them for hints and answer. That's not the problem at hand tho: we're not asking them to solve some puzzle for us, we're just seeking understanding.

Because what we're actually doing is building capability to be able to work on a wide range of problems on our own. And getting guided by people who already know there way around the codebase and know what everything does is going to get you there quicker than any other method (unless docs are truly excellent, which in most cases they're not).

So, after reflecting on it more, I disagree. I think assuming you can poke around for yourself, and start to build up a picture of what things do, may end up giving you confident delusions, that could be then hard to unlearn, or at least blockers to further understanding. Better to go to the old guard with a blank slate mindset, and let them fill you in on the overview.

Then go away and work on it, having that guidance in store, and then (if you were friendly enough in the first meet) come back for additional. That is what I think people would truly appreciate.

Think about it: assume you were someone who generally had time to help people coming to you for assistance, would you not love to sit someone down and give them an in depth download of the big picture, and details overview, of this thing into which you poured great love and devotion (or at least, many hours, sweat and dollars?). I think you would.

Anyway, it's a reminder to me that what often sounds right in the moment, and is easy to agree with, actually turns out to not be the best idea. I'm always eager to see another side, and empathize with someone else's view, but the lesson for me is: I often take that too far, and in doing so, forget what I originally came in with, forget my own frame, and forget what's true, so eager am I to see it from someone else's point of view. So that's a big lesson for me. Thanks for being part of it! Haha! :)

Re: You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?

#349

Post by keepamovin »

planede wrote: post #263
keepamovin wrote: post #3

It's funny. My first step would be 0. You reach out to the previous maintainers, visit them, buy them tea/beer and chat (eventually) about the codebase. Learned Wizards will teach you much. But I didn't see that anywhere. I think the rest of the suggestions (like get it running across platform, get tests passing) are useful stress tests likely to lead you to robustness and understanding however. But I'd def be going…

You mean the guys the company laid off last week?

Ouch, yeah. I appreciate your topicality with this comment given the recent saga of tech layoffs. Much luck to you if you're in that experience right now!! Say you got fired form a S.Eng job at 350K yearly and some young grunt on 165K slid into your DMs and wanted to meet to chat. What would make you agree to that? I think it's unlikely, but perhaps if they reflected to you all the things you already thought were stupid about that company, and that you suffered with. You would want to help them as in their suffering, you could see your own, despite getting laid off. I think in that situation, there's a chance you might actually go over the codebase with them, in a conversation that mixed 1 part that, with 1 part self-commiserating and complaining/airing/venting about the org.

What at first seems an unlikely pairing, I think, given the right "relational config" in moment could actually end up working pretty well. Seems there's plenty opportunities for such a coupling to have many fruitful outputs for both parties.

Re: You've just inherited a legacy C++ codebase, now what?

#350

Post by jchw »

jchw wrote: post #318
charcircuit wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>That's what the Debian Bug Tracking System is for. Software should be extensively tested and code review should be done before it gets shipped to users. Most users don't know about the Debian Bug Tracking system, but they do know about upstream. >Honestly, this whole tangent is pointless. Distributions like Debian have been operating like this for like 20+ years. It's dramatically too late to argue about it now, but…

> Software should be extensively tested and code review should be done before it gets shipped to users. That's why distributions have multiple branches. Debian Unstable packages get promoted to Debian Testing, which get promoted to a stable Debian release. Distributions do bug tracking and testing. > Most users don't know about the Debian Bug Tracking system, but they do know about upstream. There are over 80,000 bug…

Update for posterity: Actually, Flatpak does have a solution for plugins, and they even explicitly use OBS as an example! Unfortunately, a lot of information around the web suggests that there are only a couple of plugins available as Flatpak extensions, but actually nowadays it appears there are in fact tons[1]. Very cool! Another one off the list.

[1]: https://flathub.org/apps/com.obsproject.Studio (go to Add-ons, click "More")

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