Decoded: GNU coreutils (2019)
Very nice work and much easier than trawling through the repository.<p>Some ignorant and probably cliched musing: when I look at small utilities like these I am always struck by a seeming distinction between best practices for little C programs versus best practices for large C applications (the author of the post touches on this ad well).<p>In particular, the explicit flow (including goto) and “pedantic” style is actually quite appropriate for something &lt; 1000 lines and where the expected behavior is extremely well understood. In cases like pwd, mkdir, etc, trying to abstract too much is arguably a mistake for maintainability and understanding.<p>I say all this as an immutable functional-first dev who hasn’t done much native code :) And I think the various type-safe &#x2F; memory-safe &#x2F; etc versions of these tools are worth developing. But there’s something to be said about well-optimized native code that clearly “does what it says on the box” in a way that’s accessible to anyone who understands basic Linux programming - even if they can only contextually read C code.<p>(My only real gripe is typographic &#x2F; linting related, mostly due to being a whippersnapper).