3 ms·
Ask: famous Greenspun's Tenth Rule manifestations?
Here are some examples I'm aware of of large software systems bucking at the brutally low-level nature of their implementation language:
- Mozilla/Firefox - XPCOM, a COM/CORBA-like thing the codebase has, implements message passing and garbage collection.
- (allegedly) Yahoo's rewrite of Viaweb
- X Windows, though I've never studied its source code so I don't know for sure
- Apache: implemented using the "Apache Portable Runtime" library that provides things like hash tables and memory mapping.
Are there any other instances you're aware of?
- omouse 19y agoAbout X Windows...the last person to study its source code mysteriously died 7 days later: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_%282002_film%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_%282002_film%29
- aristus 19y agoEmacs. :) The Yahoo/Viaweb story is correct, according to usually reliable sources. Their fatal shoal was the RTML parser. MySQL's parser and query planner are pretty suspicious, too.
- DaniFong 19y agoEvery time I pick a programming language to write contests in, I work on extending the language more and more until, eventually, I hit a wall. C++ didn't allow closures, C# does have even simple macro-expansions, and then I literally start writing an interpreter for Lisp.