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by daniele_dll 1273 days ago
Fully agree with the principle but maybe let's not call Redis "well-written" :)

Redis is a great piece of software because of how much it impacted the "evolution" of Internet not because of the code quality, Redis's code resemble spaghetti code, a lot.

I will push myself and say that nowadays people would get fired for writing code like that!

And before someone start to throw stones (just for the sake of it), here a few examples: - Redis source code is FULL of GIANT files with thousands and thousands of lines of code, decoupling and separation of concerns are basic things! A few examples -- https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/src/module.c -- https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/src/cluster.c -- https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/src/redis-cli.c -- https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/src/networking....

- talking about auto generated, the repo contains commited auto generated code, a valid reason though really slips my mind (yes, of course I can think of a few, but ... really? :)))

- https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/9c7c6924a019b902996fc4b6... ... that struct feels like an "Italian minestrone", basically a kind of soup where you throw in, literally, all the vegetables you have around and it's great for a soup, a bit less for software engineering though :)

- the naming structure is a bit random at times, there is a mix of camel case, camel case mixed with underscores from time to time, pascal case

This kind of staff might be alright for a 0.3 or 0.4, maybe even for a 1.0, definitely not for a 7.x that has had 15 years to evolve :/ Even in cachegrand, that hasn't got to a v0.2 yet, I tried to avoid these kinda of dramas, in C is quick and easy to get there if you are not careful.

There are plenty of other small things but most of the big dramas should be there.
2 comments
palmtree3000 1273 days ago
Re: auto generated code: it saves ci time which is a pretty huge benefit. You still need to regenerate the code to make sure it's up to date, but you can do that in parallel with tests that rely on that code.
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daniele_dll 1273 days ago
This is a valid reason, but makes sense for code bases where the generation takes tens of minutes or more not seconds.
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sfpotter 1273 days ago
Here's one example of when to commit auto-generated code: if you use a tool like Cython and want to distribute sources to an end user, it is frequently recommended to distribute the C sources generated by Cython instead of the Cython code itself. The given reason is that the end user may not have access to Cython, but will likely have access to a C compiler. (This is frequently the case on scientific clusters where users don't have superuser privileges.)
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daniele_dll 1273 days ago
Importing a C file into a Python session is a practice that can ---easily--- cause ---a lot--- of headaches, the packages required to build the code as python library and make it importable will vary between systems and make it hard to debug in case of crashes. I personally would distribuite the pre-compiled binaries, CI + docker makes that much easier.

The fact that "can be done" doesn't necessarely mean that "it's the right way" to do it.

Going back to embedding auto-generated code, focusing on this specific case, are you telling me that a line in the requirements.txt, on a machine where the user is expected to have access to a compiler, is the reason to keep auto generated code in the repository? Sorry, personally it seems a flaky reason.

Also, the very fact that you mention that users don't have superuser privileges should be even more of a reason to use virtual environments, where you don't need super privileges, or if you can't or want to use virtual environments you can still have multiple paths in the PYTHONPATH env variable and you can install packages in a specific paths leveraging the --target of pip or the PYTHONUSERBASE env variable, solving the issue as well.

I would prefer to suggest my users to improve their runtime environment than enable them to improve the chaos.

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sfpotter 1273 days ago
I don't agree that it's a good practice, I'm simply quoting one example to you since you mentioned you were not aware of any. IIRC, you can find many GitHub issue threads on the Cython repo where they go into more detail. It has been a while since I spent any time thinking about this so the details are no longer fresh.

Unfortunately, suggesting that users improve their runtime environment is frequently a nonstarter for different reasons. (One obvious reason: users either don't have time or technical experience to do so.)

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