I really like the way you wrote about that kind of code archaeology. There's that mystery, and also almost a sense of loss when you see the ambitious hopes that

I really like the way you wrote about that kind of code archaeology. There's that mystery, and also almost a sense of loss when you see the ambitious hopes that fell by the wayside. Once in that kind of codebase, I found a snippet of code that gave me a tiny glimpse of the long tuning, bugfixing, and hacking had happened on it. In a constant propagation pass inside a compiler/jit system, deep inside for a single kind of propagation, was the line: if (strcmp(symbol_name, "ip") != 0) { Gack!! The instruction pointer, special-cased.