4 ms·

> I have seen functions that were over 60,000 lines long That can't possibly be from a serious person.

by rbanffy 3mo ago

Jtsummers 3mo ago
I've seen 10k+ SLOC functions written in C, and 20k SLOC functions written in Fortran, so it wouldn't surprise me if people created ones as big as bluGill describes. The C was almost always written by EEs who learned that function calls were expensive and so they minimized their use of them (this was their stated rationale, not me guessing). What amused me was that every time I tackled one of those things I'd reduce the line count by 70-90%, and usually at least double performance, by using a bunch of small functions to encapsulate the repeated logic. Compilers inline well, and have for quite some time.
- rbanffy 3mo ago
  > I've seen 10k+ SLOC functions written in C, and 20k SLOC functions written in Fortran, That, spoken by Rutger Hauer.
bluGill 3mo ago
Sadly it is serious and in production code. (I left there 15 years ago, I suspect it isn't in production anymore) Worse, it was a giant switch, and the target system didn't have enough memory for all the code so there were different builds and the user would select which to load. There was code like case foo: doSomething(); #ifdef build_two doSomethingElse(); break; case bar: SomeThing(); #endif MoreThings(); break; Try to follow that mess.
- rbanffy 3mo ago
  I’m not sure the author knew what was happening. It seems like it worked like this and they left it at that.
  - bluGill 3mo ago
    While this was the worst example he constantly wrote code like that. He could write code like that with few bugs faster than any other programmer I've ever worked with could write code. Management changed between loving and hating him, they knew what his code cost, but they also knew they were getting results fast when that mattered.
    - rbanffy 3mo ago
      I knew a guy who naturally wrote code that baffled me all the time. Sometimes I wondered how the compiler managed to figure it out. Fun thing: he was like that all the time - it felt like his language cortex was just wired differently.

> I have seen functions that were over 60,000 lines long That can't possibly be from a serious person.

by rbanffy 3mo ago

> I have seen functions that were over 60,000 lines long That can't possibly be from a serious person.

I've seen 10k+ SLOC functions written in C, and 20k SLOC functions written in Fortran, so it wouldn't surprise me if people created ones as big as bluGill describes. The C was almost always written by EEs who learned that function calls were expensive and so they minimized their use of them (this was their stated rationale, not me guessing). What amused me was that every time I tackled one of those things I'd reduce the line count by 70-90%, and usually at least double performance, by using a bunch of small functions to encapsulate the repeated logic. Compilers inline well, and have for quite some time.

rbanffy 3mo ago
> I've seen 10k+ SLOC functions written in C, and 20k SLOC functions written in Fortran, That, spoken by Rutger Hauer.

bluGill 3mo ago

Sadly it is serious and in production code. (I left there 15 years ago, I suspect it isn't in production anymore) Worse, it was a giant switch, and the target system didn't have enough memory for all the code so there were different builds and the user would select which to load. There was code like case foo: doSomething(); #ifdef build_two doSomethingElse(); break; case bar: SomeThing(); #endif MoreThings(); break; Try to follow that mess.

rbanffy 3mo ago
I’m not sure the author knew what was happening. It seems like it worked like this and they left it at that.
- bluGill 3mo ago
  While this was the worst example he constantly wrote code like that. He could write code like that with few bugs faster than any other programmer I've ever worked with could write code. Management changed between loving and hating him, they knew what his code cost, but they also knew they were getting results fast when that mattered.
  - rbanffy 3mo ago
    I knew a guy who naturally wrote code that baffled me all the time. Sometimes I wondered how the compiler managed to figure it out. Fun thing: he was like that all the time - it felt like his language cortex was just wired differently.