> This codebase aims to follow in Antirez's tradition of writing beautiful programs, that solve extremely difficult difficult technical problems in the simplest most elegant way possible.
Is something Antirez has talked about himself anywhere? I'm interested to know more, but am not fluent enough in C to understand what makes this code elegant.
The linenoise README mentions "sensibility for small easy to understand code". It's not really explained further in the README, but I suppose the point is that you can read the ~1200 lines of source code and get a feel for it yourself.
https://github.com/jart/bestline/blob/master/bestline.c#L286...
This interface function is already terrible. Why doesn't it check the error code of bestlineHistoryLoad()? It smells like a sloppy C program with obscure failure modes.
In short, any code that is intended to work on a wide variety of systems is usually littered with conditional compilation directives and macros that make the code extremely difficult to follow without a extensive study of the author’s “setup”. This is because to compile/run on a wide variety of systems, you actually need wildly different C source code, and what is written in the C source file ends up being more like a template for a program than the actual program.