Reading OpenBSD source code daily
Completely agree. But the tools don&#x27;t make this very easy.<p>Back in college I was working on patches to OpenSSL, Chrome, Firefox, Apache, etc., to add support for TLS-SRP, and it was a huge pain to jump into these massive codebases and try to understand them. I was using Emacs and had all of the various language support modes configured, but go-to-definition and cross-references barely worked. Searching was slow, and if I wanted to discuss a piece of code with my CS lab partners, I couldn&#x27;t just share a link.<p>A friend felt the same pain but then went to work at Google for a bit. At Google, they have some pretty amazing code reading&#x2F;searching tools (see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;research.google.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;&#x2F;pubs&#x2F;archive&#x2F;43835.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;static.googleusercontent.com&#x2F;media&#x2F;research.google.c...</a>), and these tools helped Google build a culture of thoroughly reading and reviewing code. The causality is bidirectional, but having good tools certainly played a role in Google&#x27;s success.<p>That friend and I ended up building a product, Sourcegraph, initially for ourselves to make code reading easier. We&#x27;ve now built a successful business out of it with the help of an amazing team. Here it is pulling in the OpenBSD sources: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcegraph.com&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openbsd&#x2F;src&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;lib&#x2F;libutil&#x2F;bcrypt_pbkdf.c?q=bcrypt_pbkdf#L98-98:13" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcegraph.com&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;openbsd&#x2F;src&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;lib&#x2F;li...</a>. Sourcegraph has advanced features for several languages; see  <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcegraph.com&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mholt&#x2F;caddy&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;caddyhttp&#x2F;httpserver&#x2F;https.go#L22:23$references" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sourcegraph.com&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;mholt&#x2F;caddy&#x2F;-&#x2F;blob&#x2F;caddyh...</a>, for example. If you love to read code (or want to), we hope you&#x27;ll love our product. Email me if you have any feedback&#x2F;requests.