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You're right. It amazes me how people are so willing to drop 3rd party code into a project to accomplish the most trivial things. You can put together a class

You're right. It amazes me how people are so willing to drop 3rd party code into a project to accomplish the most trivial things. You can put together a class to do, for example, ASP.NET URL Rewriting in a single sitting if you want to. And the thing you end up with will do exactly what you need and nothing else. It's like 50 lines of code. And still Junior Dev Jimmy will go find something on somebody's blog that sorta does it and pollute your project with it. It adds up quickly, and if you're not careful you'll find yourself with 2 dozen random pieces of CodeProject wackiness interacting it unexpected ways and throwing you into maintenance mode. In my experience it's just not worth it. If you're bringing in a 3rd party library, make sure it's for something big and complicated that you just don't want to deal with. Credit Card processing, Amazon Web Services integration, that sort of thing. Otherwise, take half a day and roll your own. Your life will be a lot nicer.

_delirium 16y ago
> If you're bringing in a 3rd party library, make sure it's for something big and complicated that you just don't want to deal with. It should also imo be one that appears to have a decent track record of active maintenance. If it doesn't, sooner or later you're going to be the one maintaining it, which might not turn out to be much easier than having rolled your own. I've seen more than one project that eventually did roll their own once their unmaintained 3rd-party library bit-rotted so much that it wasn't worth saving.
- phaedrus 16y ago
  Absolutely! That's one of the top criteria (right up there with type of license) when I evaluate whether to include a library in my game: is this library actively maintained? Incidently, it's one of the things that worries me about the pthreads for Windows library: it hasn't been updated in quite some time.

_delirium 16y ago

> If you're bringing in a 3rd party library, make sure it's for something big and complicated that you just don't want to deal with. It should also imo be one that appears to have a decent track record of active maintenance. If it doesn't, sooner or later you're going to be the one maintaining it, which might not turn out to be much easier than having rolled your own. I've seen more than one project that eventually did roll their own once their unmaintained 3rd-party library bit-rotted so much that it wasn't worth saving.

phaedrus 16y ago
Absolutely! That's one of the top criteria (right up there with type of license) when I evaluate whether to include a library in my game: is this library actively maintained? Incidently, it's one of the things that worries me about the pthreads for Windows library: it hasn't been updated in quite some time.