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Comment by daniel-levin | Hacker News Reader

LLVM and associated projects such as clang. Bazel is good too. OkHttp and Retrofit by Square.

I've been working with LLVM for a few years and I still find the code difficult to navigate and badly documented. And every single function's argument list is a random jumble of pointers and references (almost all arguments should be references, but many aren't).

Indeed. And it's not just medium to low-level stuff that's not well documented, it's the high-level stuff too. I personally don't mind that much if I have to spend a few minutes to understand something on a a very local scope, but if the bigger picture is unclear, that's quite bad. For LLVM one largely has to grep for a bunch of other users and try to figure it out from that.

While I think it has some clear deficiencies, I found a lot of e.g. the optimization passes in GCC a lot easier to read. It's probably above par, but e.g. https://github.com/gcc-mirror/gcc/blob/master/gcc/gimple-ssa... is really well explained imo.

LLVM is remarkable; the domain is both difficult and critical. Still, the code is consistent enough that I can often guess how things work based on what I think would be reasonable!

Don't look how inline assembly is handled between clang and llvm.

Yet it contains monsters like this one https://github.com/llvm-mirror/llvm/blob/master/lib/Target/X...

The coding standard for variables in LLVM drives me nuts. Both class names and variables names must be upper camel case so if you're lucky the code looks like this:

Analyzer TheAnalyzer;

but more commonly:

Analyzer A;

with A being utterly unhelpful to read many lines later.

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