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Part of the answer is in the next sentence: >And because nobody seems to care about these issues The word "quality" is very subjective in this case. Perhaps t

by smtddr 13y ago

Part of the answer is in the next sentence: >And because nobody seems to care about these issues The word "quality" is very subjective in this case. Perhaps the driver already did everything Qualcomm needed it to do. Maybe the code isn't perfect, but if it's working and money is being made... "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I'm sure a non-trival amount of people on HN have worked in less-than-good codebases, but finite resources & politics kinda prevents you from cleaning it all up with weeks of re-factoring and testing. I know I've seen this.

bluedino 13y ago
>> Perhaps the driver already did everything Qualcomm needed it to do Wouldn't Qualcomm spec something out and have a contractor do it, and once the requirements are met that's it? No fine-tuning or extra work involved.
megrimlock 13y ago
One reason I've seen these projects (take an existing system and make it work well) fail to gain traction is an unstated lack of faith in the people pushing for refactoring. In my experience this often comes from others having been burned by their prior proposed projects, where they've wasted 6 months doing self-indulgent refactoring that went nowhere or introduced bugs or made it hard for the rest of the team to contribute because of a bunch of new abstractions "to make the system flexible and generalized". The same people who care about code quality enough to argue for a cleanup project sometimes go overboard and burn their credibility. Unfortunately the right mix of judgment is hard to evaluate in any sense that isn't super-context-dependent.
ajross 13y ago
Finite resources? Qualcomm is doing almost $20B in revenue, absolutely owns the market for Android superphones at the moment, and the Adreno GPU is the signature element of their market-leading SoC. Yet they can't make the driver work right per the relevant specs?

by smtddr 13y ago

bluedino 13y ago

>> Perhaps the driver already did everything Qualcomm needed it to do Wouldn't Qualcomm spec something out and have a contractor do it, and once the requirements are met that's it? No fine-tuning or extra work involved.

megrimlock 13y ago

One reason I've seen these projects (take an existing system and make it work well) fail to gain traction is an unstated lack of faith in the people pushing for refactoring. In my experience this often comes from others having been burned by their prior proposed projects, where they've wasted 6 months doing self-indulgent refactoring that went nowhere or introduced bugs or made it hard for the rest of the team to contribute because of a bunch of new abstractions "to make the system flexible and generalized". The same people who care about code quality enough to argue for a cleanup project sometimes go overboard and burn their credibility. Unfortunately the right mix of judgment is hard to evaluate in any sense that isn't super-context-dependent.

ajross 13y ago

Finite resources? Qualcomm is doing almost $20B in revenue, absolutely owns the market for Android superphones at the moment, and the Adreno GPU is the signature element of their market-leading SoC. Yet they can't make the driver work right per the relevant specs?