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The README mentions Antirez's coding philosophy as being an inspiration: > This codebase aims to follow in Antirez's tradition of writing beautiful programs, t

The README mentions Antirez's coding philosophy as being an inspiration: > This codebase aims to follow in Antirez's tradition of writing beautiful programs, that solve extremely difficult difficult technical problems in the simplest most elegant way possible. Is something Antirez has talked about himself anywhere? I'm interested to know more, but am not fluent enough in C to understand what makes this code elegant.

IgorPartola 5y ago
I didn’t dive deep into this code but what I would assume makes this elegant is that it is mostly declarative/lookup style with only a little imperative code where necessary. This style doesn’t use fancy tricks/hacks and instead uses lookup tables where necessary to encapsulate logic.
jks 5y ago
This library is a fork of Antirez's linenoise, so it's perhaps not only an inspiration but a quality that the code had to begin with, which the author of the fork declares that she intends to preserve. The linenoise README mentions "sensibility for small easy to understand code". It's not really explained further in the README, but I suppose the point is that you can read the ~1200 lines of source code and get a feel for it yourself.
- cloudbonsai 5y ago
  Tbh, it doesn't seem to me like a great code. https://github.com/jart/bestline/blob/master/bestline.c#L2865 https://github.com/jart/bestline/blob/master/bestline.c#L286... This interface function is already terrible. Why doesn't it check the error code of bestlineHistoryLoad()? It smells like a sloppy C program with obscure failure modes.
nrdvana 5y ago
Open this code side by side with the source code for Cyrus IMAP, or Perl core, or libssl, and then scroll through them. You will be enlightened. In short, any code that is intended to work on a wide variety of systems is usually littered with conditional compilation directives and macros that make the code extremely difficult to follow without a extensive study of the author’s “setup”. This is because to compile/run on a wide variety of systems, you actually need wildly different C source code, and what is written in the C source file ends up being more like a template for a program than the actual program.
- jart 5y ago
  That's only if you want your source code to compile on a lot of different systems. If your goal is to be able to have your program run on a lot of systems, then it's so much easier to just attack the binary interfaces straight on and ignore the platform tooling. That's how I got my executables to run on seven operating systems. See https://justine.lol/ape.html https://justine.lol/ape.html

IgorPartola 5y ago

I didn’t dive deep into this code but what I would assume makes this elegant is that it is mostly declarative/lookup style with only a little imperative code where necessary. This style doesn’t use fancy tricks/hacks and instead uses lookup tables where necessary to encapsulate logic.

jks 5y ago

This library is a fork of Antirez's linenoise, so it's perhaps not only an inspiration but a quality that the code had to begin with, which the author of the fork declares that she intends to preserve. The linenoise README mentions "sensibility for small easy to understand code". It's not really explained further in the README, but I suppose the point is that you can read the ~1200 lines of source code and get a feel for it yourself.

cloudbonsai 5y ago
Tbh, it doesn't seem to me like a great code. https://github.com/jart/bestline/blob/master/bestline.c#L2865 https://github.com/jart/bestline/blob/master/bestline.c#L286... This interface function is already terrible. Why doesn't it check the error code of bestlineHistoryLoad()? It smells like a sloppy C program with obscure failure modes.

nrdvana 5y ago

Open this code side by side with the source code for Cyrus IMAP, or Perl core, or libssl, and then scroll through them. You will be enlightened. In short, any code that is intended to work on a wide variety of systems is usually littered with conditional compilation directives and macros that make the code extremely difficult to follow without a extensive study of the author’s “setup”. This is because to compile/run on a wide variety of systems, you actually need wildly different C source code, and what is written in the C source file ends up being more like a template for a program than the actual program.

jart 5y ago
That's only if you want your source code to compile on a lot of different systems. If your goal is to be able to have your program run on a lot of systems, then it's so much easier to just attack the binary interfaces straight on and ignore the platform tooling. That's how I got my executables to run on seven operating systems. See https://justine.lol/ape.html https://justine.lol/ape.html