<story><title>Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>akavel</author><text>I hold the source code of Go standard library &amp;amp; base distribution (i.e. compiler, etc.) in very high regard. Especially the standard library is, in my opinion, &lt;i&gt;stunningly&lt;/i&gt; easy to read, explore and understand, while at the same time being well thought through, easy to use (great and astonishingly well documented APIs), of very good performance, and with huge amounts of (also well readable!) tests. The compiler (including the runtime library) is noticeably harder to read and understand (especially because of sparse comments and somewhat idiosyncratic naming conventions; that&amp;#x27;s partly explained by it being constantly in flux). But still &lt;i&gt;doable&lt;/i&gt; for a human being, and I guess probably significantly easier than in most modern compilers. (Though I&amp;#x27;d love to be proven wrong on this account!)&lt;p&gt;At the same time, the apparent simplicity should not be mistaken for lack of effort; on the contrary, I feel every line oozes with purpose, practicality, and to-the-point-ness, like a well sharpened knife, or a great piece of art where it&amp;#x27;s not about that you cannot add more, but that you cannot &lt;i&gt;remove&lt;/i&gt; more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>013a</author><text>This is one of the great things about many Go libraries; the language is so simple its difficult to overcomplicate a Go project. This makes reading any Go source code, projects, libraries, the stdlib, a joy. The only times I&amp;#x27;ve found Go libraries to be a PITA to read is when they get autogenerated from some other language (protobuf compilations, parts of the compiler that came from C, AWS&amp;#x2F;GoogleCloud&amp;#x2F;Azure libraries, etc), but that&amp;#x27;s to be expected in every language.&lt;p&gt;Kubernetes is another great example of a project that is so unbelievably complex in its function, it should be completely impenetrable to anyone who isn&amp;#x27;t a language expert. But, go check it out; its certainly complex and huge, but actually grokable.</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What open source project, in your opinion, has the highest code quality?</title></story><parent_chain><item><author>akavel</author><text>I hold the source code of Go standard library &amp;amp; base distribution (i.e. compiler, etc.) in very high regard. Especially the standard library is, in my opinion, &lt;i&gt;stunningly&lt;/i&gt; easy to read, explore and understand, while at the same time being well thought through, easy to use (great and astonishingly well documented APIs), of very good performance, and with huge amounts of (also well readable!) tests. The compiler (including the runtime library) is noticeably harder to read and understand (especially because of sparse comments and somewhat idiosyncratic naming conventions; that&amp;#x27;s partly explained by it being constantly in flux). But still &lt;i&gt;doable&lt;/i&gt; for a human being, and I guess probably significantly easier than in most modern compilers. (Though I&amp;#x27;d love to be proven wrong on this account!)&lt;p&gt;At the same time, the apparent simplicity should not be mistaken for lack of effort; on the contrary, I feel every line oozes with purpose, practicality, and to-the-point-ness, like a well sharpened knife, or a great piece of art where it&amp;#x27;s not about that you cannot add more, but that you cannot &lt;i&gt;remove&lt;/i&gt; more.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>rusk</author><text>&lt;i&gt;&amp;gt; standard library is, in my opinion, stunningly easy to read&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Reading this brought to mind the JDK. All well structured, neatly formatted and well documented. I’ll often just click thru to the source to get the nitty-gritty on a function, I rarely need to consult the actual docs!</text></comment>