←back to thread

Ask HN: Best codebases to study to learn software design?

107 points pixelworm | 1 comments | 24 Aug 25 05:08 UTC | HN request time: 0.205s | source

I’m working on improving my software design skills, and it was recommended that I study existing well designed codebases. What are some publicly accessible codebases you would consider gold standards for software design?
Show context
shahzaibmushtaq ◴[24 Aug 25 06:30 UTC] No.45001870[source]▶
My suggestion is to search for open-source codebases in your favorite languages, study them, and start practicing them.
replies(1): >>45001985 #
pixelworm ◴[24 Aug 25 06:58 UTC] No.45001985[source]▶
I'm definitely going to do that. I asked because I wanted to start off with some that I'd knew would be well designed. However, it would probably be more interesting to see a wide variety of quality than just the good ones.

Or maybe open source projects are all usually well designed. I haven't looked at many in depth. The only one I've really looked into was Clang to try to figure out why clang format ignored my style rules when styling files of certain names. (Turns out there is a list of file names that automatically are considered Objective-C rather than C++)

replies(2): >>45004114 #>>45006311 #
zvr ◴[24 Aug 25 18:06 UTC] No.45006311[source]▶
One of the best is actually the implementation of the Tcl language. It's highly readable C code, very well structured (it was initially by Ousterhout, after all).
replies(1): >>45023523 #
1. musicale ◴[26 Aug 25 07:51 UTC] No.45023523[source]▶
I also found the Tcl implementation to be easy to read and understand.