The codebase *is* quite awful. I had a brief look at it a few years ago, and I was not impressed.
It's written in plain C, and emulates concepts such as OO or generics via very hacky means, since they're not built into the language. Heck, the whole program should have been re-written in modern-style C++ 10 years ago. Assuming constant maintenance and modernization we would have a nice, readable and maintainable C++11 codebase now, but no... Just because the current maintainers seem to be stuck in the proverbial middle ages.
Slashdot Mirror
The codebase *is* quite awful. I had a brief look at it a few years ago, and I was not impressed. It's written in plain C, and emulates concepts such as OO or generics via very hacky means, since they're not built into the language. Heck, the whole program should have been re-written in modern-style C++ 10 years ago. Assuming constant maintenance and modernization we would have a nice, readable and maintainable C++11 codebase now, but no... Just because the current maintainers seem to be stuck in the proverbial middle ages.