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Comment by dangoldin | Hacker News Reader

What a shame - it caught a few bugs in my code and has definitely made me a better programmer.

One of the reasons is that the code is hard to maintain with most open source contributions being small improvements. How have other open source projects handled large scale refactors? Is it as simple as someone creating something new from scratch and then duplicating functionality? Are there examples of large open source projects that have had ground up rewrites?

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The nice thing about FindBugs is that you can, e.g., automatically run it in a Jenkins pipeline.

Just for ad-hoc analysis in Java IntelliJ's code inspector IMO works quite well. It's also available in the community edition, so all of that code is open source: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/2016.2/code-inspection.h...

> Are there examples of large open source projects that have had ground up rewrites?

well, netscape navigator turned into firefox. it cost them dearly (in terms of market share), but there wasn't much of an alternative (joel spolsky might not agree on that).

Arguably two major rewrites: one early in the life of the Mozilla project, when the FOSS community deemed the original Netscape code dump to be nearly unmaintainable, and the second during the creation of Firefox itself (although that was mostly a re-do of the browser chrome, while the core was left untouched).

It was Phoenix -> Firebird -> Firefox.

Those were just name changes, the rewrites were Netscape → Mozilla Suite → Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox.

GHC has had a few major rewrites of key components.

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