3 ms·

What does "fruit-fly code" mean? Short programs?

• pokpokpok 9y ago
  fruit flies are used in research because they are relatively simple, well-studied stand-ins for a larger class of organism. having a super minimal reference implementation of a complicated subject makes it easier to learn, and easier to build on in a way that will be broadly understandable way. it's a communication tool
• beeforpork 9y ago
  Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
• sitkack 9y ago
  See things like https://github.com/aosabook/500lines https://github.com/aosabook/500lines http://plzoo.andrej.com/ http://plzoo.andrej.com/ Or any somewhat readable, compact codebases. Redis, Lua, etc. Often they are pedagogical in purpose, but sometimes on accident due to ruthless factoring. No one can "learn compilers" from reading LLVM source code. But one could get the idea in a couple hours of reading http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~felipe/IFT2030-Automne2002/Complements/tinyc.c http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~felipe/IFT2030-Automne2002/Comp... And in a couple more by porting it to a new language. Think of building an exact scaled down replica of a plane or a ship before embarking on the larger version. Now build an even lighter weight model, just for learning how to build the model. This is a "fruit-fly" code.