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Learning and Maintaining a Large Inherited Codebase?
An anonymous reader writes "A couple of times in my career, I've inherited a fairly large (30-40 thousand lines) collection of code. The original authors knew it because they wrote it; I didn't, and I don't. I spend a huge amount of time finding the right place to make a change, far more than I do changing anything. How would you learn such a big hunk of code? And how discouraged should I be that I can't seem to 'get' this code as well as the original developers?"
Why are you whining about that small of a code base. GCC is far larger and I've ported it to several systems some that required rewriting core elements of the code generators. It's a few million lines of code. Thirty to forty thousand lines of code is a small program and probably a single executable at that. Build yourself a picture of the major elements of the code and from that map you can get anywhere you want. It's only computer science after all it's not rocket...oh sorry some of the code I've written is in a rocket so I guess it could be rocket science too. Well you get the picture. Just like any new city you need a map. Once you have that it's cake. Oh and the cake is a lie...
Why bother
Two links to the same book doesn't equal two actual book links.
Perhaps rather than using the word "few" I should have calculated whatever small percentage of books are available on the topic.
But then again, I have a life.