[HN Gopher] The Architecture of Open Source Applications
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The Architecture of Open Source Applications
Author : letientai299
Score : 260 points
Date : 2020-08-31 15:34 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aosabook.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (aosabook.org)
| chubot wrote:
| FWIW the Oil project was partly (negatively) inspired by the very
| helpful description of bash's architecture:
|
| https://aosabook.org/en/bash.html
|
| The maintainer expresses some regret about the parser
| architecture. I referenced this in several 2016-2017 blog posts:
|
| _OSH Parses Shell Scripts Up Front in a Single Pass. Other
| Shells Don 't_ - http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/10/13.html
|
| _OSH Can Be Parsed With Two Tokens of Lookahead_ -
| http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2016/11/17.html
|
| _The Thinner Waist of the Interpreter_ -
| http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/01/26.html
|
| _Word Evaluation_ - http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2017/03/09.html
|
| ----
|
| This principled architecture ended up paying off in a couple
| unexpected ways, which I wrote about earlier this year:
|
| _Oil Uses Its Parser For History And Completion_ -
| http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/history-and-completion....
|
| _Oil 's Parser Doesn't Worry About Aliases and Prompts_ -
| http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/01/alias-and-prompt.html
|
| Summary: in addition to the regrets expressed by the maintainer
| in the article, bash actually has multiple ad hoc, incorrect
| parsers for its own language! They are incorrect to the point
| that a separate project (bash-completion) has code to paper over
| the errors.
|
| Oil uses the same parser for all use cases. Moreover, its parser
| isn't littered with orthogonal concerns like the interactive
| prompt and expanding aliases.
|
| ----
|
| However I still need help finishing the project -- see what I've
| cut here: http://www.oilshell.org/blog/2020/08/risks.html
|
| And feel free to contact me (address on home page and in profile)
| dllthomas wrote:
| I've been working through the first volume in a reading group
| with a few friends. Some chapters are definitely better than
| others, and it often requires awareness that it captures a
| snapshot of thinking from ~10 years ago, but it's been a good
| experience.
| astatine wrote:
| I was inspired by the AOSA many years ago and I had studied (and
| held out) as an example the Apache architecture (about 18-20
| years ago). It is indeed a pity that so many younger software
| engineers really have no idea of how heavily used real-world
| systems get built. Nor do they understand all the various
| tradeoffs and corner cases that need to get handled to make
| products work well in real life.
|
| Building Apache from source (including a few key addon modules)
| and configuring it to work for a small set of tests was step 1 at
| my organization then. Those successful at this would then get
| into the source itself. Fun times!
| fizwhiz wrote:
| > It is indeed a pity that so many younger software engineers
| really have no idea of how heavily used real-world systems get
| built. Nor do they understand all the various tradeoffs and
| corner cases that need to get handled to make products work
| well in real life.
|
| Isn't that a hallmark of a junior engineer :) ? If you're
| trying to achieve deeper technical depth (which takes time), it
| helps to be a part of an organization that _rewards_ said
| technical depth.
| mesaframe wrote:
| > it helps to be a part of an organization that rewards said
| technical depth.
|
| I agree. My previous job wanted to employees to finish work
| ASAP. There were no incentives for quality. Performance was
| judged on the basis of how fast one can push things out
| irrespective of quality. As a result there was lack of
| engineering.
| pault wrote:
| Not only that, but those types of organizations are also
| the ones that are likely to tell experienced engineers that
| they are "overqualified" for the job because they want more
| juniors that won't push back against harmful practices.
| krisgenre wrote:
| Unfortunately deep technical depth is unwarranted and
| unwelcomed in many organizations. In fact you repeatedly get
| told that "the customer doesn't care about your code". At the
| end of the day adding yet another 'if' condition to patch up
| things is what is usually appreciated.
| non-entity wrote:
| > I once worked at a place where we had an endpoint on an
| application taking a long time because of a weird DB query,
| like 12+ seconds to query a few hundred rows. Was pretty much
| told if we didn't figure it out today it doesn't matter,
| we'll ship it like that.
| eatonphil wrote:
| I've had the idea for a while to start a club to read through
| open source projects, compile them, extend them, note
| architectures and design decisions, look at documentation and
| CI/testing organization, etc.
|
| Do something like one project per month with one topic among the
| above per week. Haven't found the right group of folks to
| experiment on with this yet.
|
| Edit: Send me an email if you'd like and I'll think about hosting
| this virtually.
| nandhinianand wrote:
| Me too.. I've not found the trigger to keep doing it on my
| own.. So a group might work..
| mathieubordere wrote:
| email sent!
| Jarwain wrote:
| Sounds like fun! If you end up putting this together, I'd
| definitely be interested
| tobylane wrote:
| Are you looking for a book club like group to hop around with
| or some projects eager to have you?
| serial_dev wrote:
| That would be really cool. Maybe live streaming the content?
| [deleted]
| MoroCode wrote:
| This sounds really interesting !
| jooz wrote:
| To understand large codebases is my biggest weakness. I would
| be definitively interested.
| di1eep wrote:
| Very much interested. Email sent.
| phkahler wrote:
| Do it yourself on youtube. Have a patreon page. Go over the
| code yourself to get your impressions and then interview the
| main contributors about the project.
|
| Done right I think that may go somewhere.
| danbmil99 wrote:
| I would definitely subscribe
| Cognitron wrote:
| Same
| dwoot wrote:
| samesies
| dzink wrote:
| I'd love to join as well. Email sent.
| iandinwoodie wrote:
| I'm interested; email sent!
| jcranmer wrote:
| On a similar note, I've thought about putting together a
| presentation on debugging and understanding large codebases by
| fixing a bug on a large project whose source code I've
| literally never seen before. I figure that by picking a
| codebase I have 0 experience with, there's less risk of
| skipping over steps.
|
| The biggest hurdle for me has been actually finding a project
| I'm interested in where I haven't yet gone poking around the
| source code for some reason or another.
| eatonphil wrote:
| Yeah, I've also been interested in writing more about
| orienting yourself in novel codebases. I don't think it's
| explored very much.
|
| It's a pain to write about because you have to find some
| contrived error (real or not) in a contrived app. I've got a
| draft of a post but without the examples filled in.
|
| Would like to read (and share) what you've got.
| monksy wrote:
| It's not explored very much because most new developers try
| to push for greenfield development and they're trying to
| split everything up even when it doesn't need it.
|
| Now we're having multiples of codebases to comb through.
| spirobel wrote:
| me too. I actually did this with the discourse.org codebase. I
| can make a youtube video about it if someone is interested. I
| spent over a year digging into it.
| EGreg wrote:
| Ooh can you do ours? It's a fair bit more complex mand
| general-purpose than Discourse, though.
|
| Would be great to see your impressions as you dig into it and
| maybe record yourself on youtube. Any way I can be of
| assistance, let me know.
|
| https://github.com/Qbix/Platform
| farias0 wrote:
| I'm definitely interested!
| badrchoubai wrote:
| I'm interested in this
| faustocarva wrote:
| Sure i'm also interested
| sali0 wrote:
| Very interested, would love to be a part of this.
| dang wrote:
| If curious see also
|
| 2019 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20731206
|
| 2015 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9418788
|
| 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6404929
|
| 2013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6613748
|
| 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2904425
|
| 2011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2598643
|
| 2011 (a bit) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2578071
|
| There have been many other submissions
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=aosabook.org), but those
| seem to be the nontrivial threads about the book itself.
| amelius wrote:
| I'd like to see Kicad, Freecad and Inkscape covered.
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