That doesn't look hacky, it looks written by someone with 3 months of programming experience. I would personally avoid relying on an editor written by programming newbies.
I always find it interesting how hostile some (many?) peoples take on source code can be. Rather than give benefit of doubt, they attack. But even if it is some stupid code, some late-night, tired-brain, foggy-flu-delirium .. so what?
I get it, don't run a project if you see some bad code and question the quality of the project. Quality that very well could, and likely will, impact you. From bugs to performance. Don't run it, of course. But to attack it, seemingly with such personal zeal.. can people not improve?
I dunno, i guess i just don't feel the software we write on average is actually good. We make compromises and mistakes constantly. Our house is the purist of glass and many of us are just chucking stones like there's no tomorrow.
Lets take a step back. Breathe. Point out flaws by all means, but maybe reduce the often apparent revelry in someone else's mistake.
... sorry for the high horse rant. I'm nursing coffee and i've just seen it a lot with Lemmy/Kbin recently. Also this isn't pointed at anyone here directly.. just a pattern i feel i frequently see.
What? No. An ad hominem is "I think your argument is wrong because your face is stupid". "This is bad software because it looks like it's made by amateurs" isn't attacking their character, it's attacking their ability to write good software, which is highly relevant.
"The code is bad because it was written by a novice dev" sounds like an ad hominem attack to me (as opposed to "the code is bad because of X attribute of the code itself").
It looks to me like it was written by someone quite intentionally to avoid allocations in the common case, and they punted on handling less common cases to later.
I'm struggling to see how that function could be a bottleneck, and if it were, memoization would easily get rid of it without the ridiculous limitation.
It could be better for sure, but that function has been there for almost as long as the project has been open-source if I recall correctly. It probably hasn't been touched since then because it wasn't a high priority.
Ad hominem attack aside... it was chosen because they didn't see a realistic need for more than 8 spaces. Nobody has openly complained in the past 2 years Helix has been around until now, so they were at least mostly right.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem