Hi! Today I'd like to share some thoughts about code quality and deterioration on #FOSS, also related to technical debt, maintainability and product growing. Here it is my experience with #raylib after 7 years working on it... 1/n
When I started raylib, my programming knowledge was not the same than now, I learned many things during this journey and I know there are some pieces of code that should be rewritten from scratch. That requires redesign, implementation and testing... it requires time... 2/n
If that problem happens with a small project like raylib (~50K locs) and requires a fair amount of work to review and redesign, I can't imagine how painful it could be for bigger #FOSS projects with way more years in development. Same happens with closed source project... 3/n
For example, in #raylib, rlgl layer (that connects with multiple OpenGL backends) has been redesigned at least 3 times; the window and inputs system, to accommodate every new platform; the 3d parts, to support animations; the audio module to switch to #miniaudio backend... 4/n
In my case, it required hours and hours of code review... so, I wonder how it is done with bigger projects. Code quality is high since the beginning? is it always ready to be adapted to changes? product vision is clearly defined since start? all contributors are aligned? 5/n
In my case, I chose C because it's an quite simple language, easy to read and understand, it can survive quite well the pass of time but... what about other projects using more complex or less popular languages? Project maintainability cost grows with the language complexity! 6/n
Summarizing, #FOSS projects get old and they could accumulate youth errors... but also experience. Trying to keep a project young/up-to-date implies hard decisions and A LOT of work. Sometimes, it could even seem that re-starting the project from scratch is better option... 7/7
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