Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

64 pointsdebanjan1677 comments

A very small team may also count.

Excellent = usability/utility or the quality of code.

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FTL and Into The Breach are made by two developers, Justin and Matt of Subset Games.

Woz wrote all the Apple I and II software.

Cave Story, a metroidvania still actively ported to new platforms today.

Doom had a very small team, Carmack doing most/all of the engine work.

Dwarf Fortress is by two developers, and simulates its environment down to a very precise level of detail.

Many more here: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6u4pn/what_suc...

Axiom Verge was written by one person (even the music, in his words "that was the easiest part").

Calibre developed by Kovid Goyal it's a one stop shop for eBook management. His reply to the issue

"Python 2 is retiring in thirty months. Calibre needs to convert to Python 3."

was

"No, it doesn't. I am perfectly capable of maintaining python 2 myself. Far less work than migrating the entire calibre codebase.

status wontfix"

[1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/1714107

TIL that my favorite terminal[1] was written by the author of Calibre.

[1]: https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/

You had me until the anecdote. I understand the sentiment and intent of what’s being said, but as a security professional it just paints themselves, their applications, and their user base as targets. Knowing it’s a won’t fix means it’s also easier to sell exploits if not disclosing as it’s clear he doesn’t intend to upgrade to a maintained and supported version of Python, so it should work for longer than most exploits.

On a second look I see that they did moved to Python 3 with Calibre 5 on Sep 2020

Calibre has a bad history with security already - for example https://lwn.net/Articles/464824/

If you use the program its plainly obvious this kind of opinion is well spread through it. Of course I deeply respect anyone who puts their work out for free as FOSS but the tool is not a shining example of good software.

His name must have been really unfortunate at the start of the pandemic…

+1 for Calibre. It is such a wonder of software to me. I respected his reasoning though as another commenter has observed [1], it seemed inevitable that they would have to migrate at some point.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33517830

Anything by Fabrice Bellard - https://bellard.org/

Yes.

But not really "anything by" since his most known project is ffmpeg and it was a one-person show only initially, in 2000-2001.

Surprised nobody mentioned https://curl.se

and it's author: https://daniel.haxx.se

Photopea https://www.photopea.com

Also Sayonara is a great music player for Linux - https://sayonara-player.com

1) Chris Sawyer wrote Transport Tycoon and RollerCoaster Tycoon in assembly.

2) SerenetyOS started off as a one man project by Andreas Kling.

1st was exactly what I thought of. One or the other would have been monumental, never mind both!

For games, I believe Stardew Valley was a one man effort including all art and music.

Redis I would say, by Salvatore Sanfilippo (https://github.com/antirez)

OG redis was great. I think post-antirez it has grown too complex.

I'd be interested in a redis-lite fork.

It's kinda natural evolution. It started with "just a KV store with few extras" and just grew more and more and more extras over time. It's "... and the kitchen sink" of databases.

SQLite by D. Richard Hipp also still maintains it by himself I guess Linux kernel could also be considered still being maintained by a single person even though it's mostly contributions from other people, don't know the rules

I've been amazed almost every single day since I installed it few months ago by how useful and well done Dato on macOS is.

https://sindresorhus.com/dato

It fixes one of my main issue with macOS, its inability to show a calendar by clicking on the day in status bar, and adds tons of great feature without feeling bloaty. Great great job. Thank you Sindre Sorhus for making my life easier !

Another World http://anotherworld.fr/anotherworld_uk/another_world.htm

The author, Eric Chahi, did the design, art, code and some sound effects. Jean-François Freitas did the music and sound effects.

Wondered that nobody mentioned Latex. I didn't look at the source code, but Laslie Lamport said he would pay a price (1000 USD?) for every error detected, and AFAIR he never had to pay a single dime. So the code should be qualifying for 'excellent'.

Did Leslie say that? I know TeX creator Knuth has had a long-standing bug/typo/error bounty for his works.

Oh, yes. I mixed up TeX and LaTeX. And the amount of the bug bounty, too. Sorry.

Rnote - Sketch and take handwritten notes.

Use it daily to take notes in lessons, never had any issues with it and he fixes stuff really fast compared to other similar sized projects (in my experience).

Before that i used xournal++ but rnote feels more stable/modern but lacks some features that xournal++ has

https://github.com/flxzt/rnote

Pinball Construction Set by Bill Budge. Steve Wozniak called it "the greatest program ever written for an 8-bit machine."

Lichess by Thibault Duplessis

https://github.com/lichess-org/lila/graphs/contributors

TempleOS

RIP Terry A. David

https://templeos.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TempleOS

RIP, ring 0 or die trying

Quote from Terry A. David

> I asked God about racism? He said, "sports".[0]

He's an interesting case in the balance between autonomy and bad decisions.

Apparently his schizophrenia was easily controlled but he didn't want to give up what he felt was a direct line to God.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_A._Davis

what is worse, to suffer being yourself or suffer being not yourself? meds are not always the answer...

we all have to go out eventually, some have the "luxury" of choosing the way we go

Thats a nice way to think about it. Perhaps we have more control these days and less choice.

He was also lucky enough to have a supportive family. After repeated trials of forced treatment all agreed that it was not tenable indefinitely.

At the time he passed there was an assumption he'd been killed. He would call people who he felt persecuted him, simply walking by him was enough, the N-word. Many buttock clenching a moment caught on his livestreams.

In the end it was likely an accident with him living around train tracks.

Minecraft (actually 2 people?), rollercoaster tycoon (written in assembly), the first version of the Facebook, ape (a plasmid editor), Stardew valley, onward VR(??).

Minecraft is some excellent game design, but the code quality of early versions (back when it was only two people) is lacking. They did call it beta and alpha so it's not like they were claiming any different.

Sidekiq by Mike Perham is amazing. I’ve scaled multiple businesses on it’s back.

Sidekiq is one of the few things like RSpec and Factorybot that's become part of the standard toolkit in Rails land.

I really like the various projects at https://suckless.org/

/bin/false

Does one thing and does it well

The code for this is surprisingly complex for a program that does nothing https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true....

I stand corrected.

It's not very well written.

/bin/yes # ;)

I'm not sure about "a single person" but I believe Flask and Requests (both Python libraries) are/were at least strongly connected to a single 'creator' (Armin Ronacher and Kenneth Reitz respectively) that come to mind for me, though both have larger communities of contributors these days.

Kenneth Reitz wanted to be a programmer like Armin Ronacher.

The Acorn image editor for macOS by Gus Mueller is shockingly polished for a one-person project. I use it all the time. In my few times interacting with him through support he’s been really kind as well.

https://flyingmeat.com/acorn/

Capnproto by Kenton Varda <https://capnproto.org>.

There have certainly been other contributors <https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/master/CONTRIBUT...>, but Kenton does most of the development and maintenance on his own.

There are few things I lament more than having to spin up on a new serialization / file format and it isn't using Capnproto or Protobufs or some similar invention. Capnproto has truly spoiled me in terms of how consistent and feature rich it is for what seems like a "simple" task.

LINQPad: https://www.linqpad.net

Total Commander seems to be a one-man effort. Similarly, Sublime Editor is two people IIRC?

Wasn't Git written by Linus?

The initial version was. Linus however handed over the maintainer role very early on after the initial release and hasn't had much to with the active development of git for years.

I'm not sure if it truly fits this category, but HarfBuzz[0], maintained primarily by Behdad Esfahbod, comes to mind.

[0] https://harfbuzz.github.io/

Loren Brichter’s iOS word game, Letterpress, was a one-person tour de force. Not only did he do the sound effects himself, but he apparently bypassed UIKit entirely using OpenGL calls. Kinda crazy, but then again he was on the original iPhone team…

https://www.imore.com/loren-brichter-talks-opengl-tweetie-le...

Esbuild (it’s open source but much of the work is done by one person)

LooknStop Firewall was the best - but who can tell what happened to the only author Frederic Gloannec ?

Everything Search 1.5 Alpha by David Carpenter is available for testing ( https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=9787 ).

LnS: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/why-did-you-buy-look... (perfect stealth) + the ability to block at the level of every dll run by svhost till windows 7 - then the author disappear and no solution like that anymore (it used TDI removed after windows 8).

Nobody's mentioned Touhou yet? Not only does Zun do all the programming, he also does all the graphics, music, and scriptwriting.

There are so many. MIDIBox by Thorsten Klose is great. Open source hardware and software. There are a ton of projects based on it. I am not sure what the level of other contributors are now, but it was mostly or all Thorsten back when I was looking at it 10-15 years ago.

http://midibox.org/

Quentin Zervaas is the creator of the Streaks habit-tracking app (https://streaksapp.com), which I find to be excellent and extremely well thought-out. I’m not sure if he’s still working independently or has a team.

Reaper (http://reaper.fm/)

Not single person

> Cockos currently has two programmers.[5] Justin Frankel, the company founder, probably best known for his work on the Winamp media player application, and John Schwartz, who joined Cockos in 2008 and is the author of many audio plug-ins, notably a virtual analogue synthesizer called Olga. Christophe Thibault, an old colleague of Frankel's from his Nullsoft days, was a Cockos employee between 2005-2014.

But I honestly expected like 5

I last used it more than a decade ago, but Pegasus Mail by David Harris was my MUA for more than a decade before that: https://www.pmail.com. Surprisingly it seems to be still alive even today.

https://beta.f1mv.com/ as it's enhanced the experience for F1 for me. Built by a single dev and better than anything F1 management has released as official clients.

FASM (Flat Assembler) by Tomasz Grysztar: https://flatassembler.net

Unfortunately it won't run on recent Macs since it's written in 32-bit assembly, so some modifications are needed.

qmail/djbdns written by Dan Bernstein were groundbreaking when released, and are extremely interesting in terms of how to build and design robust software to be deployed in a security-critical hostile environment

https://git-annex.branchable.com/

Renderdoc https://renderdoc.org/

Braid, the game.

YJS - https://github.com/yjs.

I know at this point it must have hundreds of contributors but wasn't Zig mainly built by one guy?

Stardew Valley

By Eric Barone, including the very superlative artwork and music inclusive.

Excellent quality of code and usability...

My very own small Android apps, of course.

GeoFS browser-based flight simulator by by Xavier Tassi

Irfanview

Nirsoft?