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With the age of their respective codebases, I'd love to know what lurks beneath? Immaculate, well factored code? A hornets nest of hacks - what do you expect fr
by ed_blackburn 11y ago
With the age of their respective codebases, I'd love to know what lurks beneath? Immaculate, well factored code? A hornets nest of hacks - what do you expect from such old codebases - or have they been re-written so many times you'd never guess their ages from the codebase.
- mixedCase 11y agoVim's codebase is known to be one of the most unclean collections of C code out there. It's one of the reasons why Neovim came into existence.
- ageofwant 11y agoPfft on immaculate, well factored code. All glory to battle hardened code that does the business everyday. Of course it would be better to have both. But don't dismiss code that survived the withering infernos of real world use. All those edge hacks are there because they probably need to be.
- oblio 11y agoVim code predates a lot of modern best practices. It's not all cruft a la Spolsky's blog post. Some of it is just goo.
- ed_blackburn 11y agoI completely appreciate that. 'Tis always a case of striking a balance. Even battle hardened code with countless edge-cases can be well factored. A system programmer whose opinion I trust greatly recently advised me to look at the postgress code for well factored, battle hardened code. I've heard others suggest that libgit2 is similar. I don't feel confident / qualified enough to comment.