Ask HN: Which Opens Source Software have the sexiest code?

by milkoolong on 4/4/2025, 9:27:41 PM with 10 comments
I heard reading well-written code can improve my skills. Instead of reading top-rated projects on GitHub, which I do, I thought to ask the community to share their favorite OSS they believe to have examplary code.

  • by 0xCE0 on 4/5/2025, 5:13:06 PM

    Many Freedesktop-projects have very beautiful/elegant/professional/clear C code, e.g.: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/amd...

    Also Blender, Chrome, FFmpeg, LLVM are examples for large and long scale projects codebases, that are almost like old vs. new brain, meaning there are old low-level codelines and on top of those cumulates all kinds of abstractions.

    Geohot's tinygrad is great example of booting up codebase from scratch: set conscious goal for small max lines of code (e.g. 1k), then code the next state of working implementation, then clean and refactor it to cut the fat off. It feels that code wants to shape to specific form and size depending on goal.

  • by markus_zhang on 4/5/2025, 1:59:43 AM

    Linux? I don't understand anything about it so it's sexy. Like girls, I never understood them.

  • by palata on 4/5/2025, 7:32:14 PM

    In C++, I find Cap'n Proto very impressive: https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto

  • by bjourne on 4/5/2025, 5:27:14 PM

    Anything created by the Pallets team: https://github.com/pallets

  • by BobbyTables2 on 4/5/2025, 3:05:16 PM

    All OSS code is exemplary.

    Of course, some of it fits one meaning of the word and some fits the other meaning.

  • by cpach on 4/5/2025, 3:35:46 PM

    Is well-written code “sexy”? I’m not so sure about that.

  • by hiAndrewQuinn on 4/5/2025, 3:50:26 AM

    OpenBSD

  • by jlcases on 4/5/2025, 7:44:20 AM

    Code readability is directly related to the quality of its contextual documentation. I've been experimenting with documentation following MECE principles, which has greatly improved the maintainability of my projects.