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170,000 lines of Matlab code for a project is not a good sign. Unless they’re also including the source of various Matlab toolboxes which are already tested by

by knolan 6y ago

170,000 lines of Matlab code for a project is not a good sign. Unless they’re also including the source of various Matlab toolboxes which are already tested by the Mathworks. It’s such a high-level language it’s hard to imagine what the hell they’re doing with all that code. It’s probably mostly useless cruft from GUIDE.

sdenton4 6y ago
My guess is a bit of each: The company high-balling the LoC estimate to try to impress/scare the judge, but prooobably also has a truly terrible codebase.
breischl 6y ago
How that number was probably arrived at... PHB: Hey, how many lines of code do we have? CodeMonkey: You want a high estimate or a low estimate? PHB: High CodeMonkey: Well, including unit tests, comments, whitespace, build scripts, integration test harness... 170k At least I hope they have enough testing code to be signficant...
h0l0cube 6y ago
Having seen Matlab code that's been exported to C, it's mostly bloated by static arrays, and there's quite a lot of redundant functions. So maybe the LOC count is from a C export?
willis936 6y ago
I’ve made 4 decent sized gui based tools before. I would never use GUIDE. At minimum it uses eval. If you want a terrible gui-based gui creation interface: labview awaits.
- knolan 6y ago
  I compiled eval once for fun.
  - willis936 6y ago
    A friend of mine did that. They were able to run arbitrary .m files from an executable. As far as I know, this doesn't violate any terms of use. I wonder what keeps someone from just downloading the freely available MATLAB runtime and running a compiled eval wrapper and suddenly have a freely available version of MATLAB. Also just because eval can be compiled doesn't mean it should. It will forever be a security risk and I will not write code that uses it in good conscious. Fortunately, Mathworks has provided good alternatives. My personal favorite has been variable field names. It really opens up a lot of elegant coding. https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/string-evaluation.html https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/string-eva...

by knolan 6y ago

sdenton4 6y ago

My guess is a bit of each: The company high-balling the LoC estimate to try to impress/scare the judge, but prooobably also has a truly terrible codebase.

breischl 6y ago

How that number was probably arrived at... PHB: Hey, how many lines of code do we have? CodeMonkey: You want a high estimate or a low estimate? PHB: High CodeMonkey: Well, including unit tests, comments, whitespace, build scripts, integration test harness... 170k At least I hope they have enough testing code to be signficant...

h0l0cube 6y ago

Having seen Matlab code that's been exported to C, it's mostly bloated by static arrays, and there's quite a lot of redundant functions. So maybe the LOC count is from a C export?

willis936 6y ago

I’ve made 4 decent sized gui based tools before. I would never use GUIDE. At minimum it uses eval. If you want a terrible gui-based gui creation interface: labview awaits.

knolan 6y ago
I compiled eval once for fun.
- willis936 6y ago
  A friend of mine did that. They were able to run arbitrary .m files from an executable. As far as I know, this doesn't violate any terms of use. I wonder what keeps someone from just downloading the freely available MATLAB runtime and running a compiled eval wrapper and suddenly have a freely available version of MATLAB. Also just because eval can be compiled doesn't mean it should. It will forever be a security risk and I will not write code that uses it in good conscious. Fortunately, Mathworks has provided good alternatives. My personal favorite has been variable field names. It really opens up a lot of elegant coding. https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/string-evaluation.html https://www.mathworks.com/help/matlab/matlab_prog/string-eva...