Show HN: Awesome-code-reading - A curated list of high-quality codebases to read

[Vetre]

I like looking at much better code bases than my own when I am considering making something. It's weird, but it really motivates me.

Here are a handful of ones that I really like (all related to gaming):

DOOM:

http://fabiensanglard.net/doom3/index.php - A great overview of it, mentioning the third game and its variants. Their whole github is pretty great. Just worth noting that many people consider Carmack's code to be some of the best in the industry. Really worth a read.

https://github.com/fabiensanglard/Doom3-for-MacOSX-

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM

https://github.com/id-Software/DOOM-3

Monogame:

The Open Source implementation of Microsoft's XNA game dev framework. Really well loved C# code. And they keep it very clean.

https://github.com/MonoGame/MonoGame

Battle for Wesnoth:

Famous and well loved open source 4x game

https://github.com/wesnoth/wesnoth

Rogue-Likes:

There are a bunch of rogue-likes that are open source. It's a lovely look at the evolution of the genre and old school limitations. The genre as a whole is very open source friendly.

http://rephial.org/ - Angband

https://github.com/crawl/crawl - Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

Lastly, here is a list of open source games. I would argue a huge chunk are not that nice. But there are gems in here. https://github.com/leereilly/games

[lucaslee]

Hi, thanks for sharing these games related projects. I noticed some of them are fairly large projects with tens of thousands lines of code, which is a major roadblock for many people to learn something from a large codebase. What do you look for in them? For example, do you just want to see how a particular component, like a rendering engine, is implemented? (just guessing, I know nothing about games)

[lucaslee]

Thanks for checking out my project. Here is some background information.

I contributed to a few open source projects over the years, but I only focused on solving the problem I had, either a bug I wanted to fix or a feature I wanted to add. Once my issue was resolved, I didn't really care much about the rest of the project. I found it was less of a learning opportunity.

That's why I created this project to really track down the codebases that you can read from start to finish and learn how they are designed and implemented. Currently it only lists a few codebases that I actually have read. They are mostly small-size projects. I'd like to hear advice on how to approach and learn from a large project.

[fit2rule]

You need one for Lua - the Lua sources themselves.

Also, LuaJIT.

[kureikain]

I like this idea. I run a news letter[0] and we have a sections call `Code to read`. People love it.

That's being said, your repository probably end up on my next issue :).

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[0] https://betterdev.link

[lucaslee]

Thank you! I just subscribed to your newsletter. I especially like the "code to read" section. Checked several past issues and props to you for the consistency there.

[artpar]

I curated a similar list of codebases from HN comments here

https://medium.com/@012parth/what-source-code-is-worth-study...

[lucaslee]

Thanks for the link. The list is solid. I have seen them being talked about many times in various threads here. Bookmarked.

[mettamage]

How do you go about reading codebases? I once fired up a debugger to go through ExpressJS and I learned some things from it. At the same time I wonder how I can do it efficiently.

[rc_hadoken]

No Python?...seriously? I'm still learning so I don't have any clout to throw around concerning a good Python code-base. Any suggestions?

[rejectedalot]

Check out peter norvig’s python code

[androidgirl]

I've personally gone through a lot of the django codebase. It's got a lot inside it, and is pretty easy to understand!!!

Bottle can be read from end to end, and one can understand how it works internally fairly quickly.

[lucaslee]

Hi, thanks for checking it out. I am sure there are a lot good python projects, but this project just gets started and hopefully we can get some good nominations on python projects. PR welcome :)

[Graziano_M]

requests