Code Quality In Open and Closed Source Kernels 252
Diomidis Spinellis writes "Earlier today I presented at the 30th International Conference on Software Engineering a research paper comparing the code quality of Linux, Windows (its research kernel distribution), OpenSolaris, and FreeBSD. For the comparison I parsed multiple configurations of these systems (more than ten million lines) and stored the results in four databases, where I could run SQL queries on them. This amounted to 8GB of data, 160 million records. (I've made the databases and the SQL queries available online.) The areas I examined were file organization, code structure, code style, preprocessing, and data organization. To my surprise there was no clear winner or loser, but there were interesting differences in specific areas. As the summary concludes: '..the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.'"
Closed Source? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Is it just me? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The 99% Solution (Score:4, Informative)
Re: my kernel comparison link (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not that surprising (Score:4, Informative)
Is it because of intellisense? That's kind of nice, especially when your code is so disorganized that you don't remember where stuff is defined. Or if you can't open stuff up in two different windows to see where it is defined, like VS prevents you from doing (yeah, you sort of can, but it's stuck in the main VS window).
Is it because of the debugger? Sure, the debugger is nice, and I like it, but it only helps get rid of the easy bugs. The bugs that really eat your development time are the ones that only manifest themselves after the program has been running for a few hours/days, and usually a debugger doesn't help much with that. Besides, every other IDE comes with a debugger, even GDB works fine if you can handle arcane keystroke combinations.
And on top of it, Solutions and projects in VS are horrible. Why does VS try to save the solution every time I quit? Makefiles have some awful syntax, but at least when they change, I know it's because of what I've done, and I know how to fix it.
That said, I don't consider VS to be a bad IDE, it is reasonably decent. I just don't understand the logic of these guys who think that VS is the greatest IDE ever. It's a question, not a flame.
Re:The 99% Solution (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is it just me? (Score:4, Informative)