Ask HN: Which closed-source software would you most like to see the code for?

22 points by rxlim 9 years ago | 32 comments

I would choose Winamp 2 as the early versions of Winamp is exactly how I think software should be, and I also have great memories with it.

toomuchtodo 9 years ago |

- US air traffic control software

- Software that drives the NYSE and NASDAQ exchanges

- SpaceX Dragon vehicle controller (primarily what calculates the boostback trajectory on the fly)

EDIT: Honorable mention: The Knight Capital codebase [1]

Disclaimer: Please lawd don't let this put my on a watch list.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-08-02/knight-sh...

tdb7893 9 years ago | |

I met someone who worked on air traffic control software and I think it would be scary to see.

zbuf 9 years ago |

Renoise, music production software.

I've found it to be exceptionally stable and responsive; changes propagate with live feedback right throughout the GUI.

I'd really like to see if its qualities are the result of great software design, or just brute force and hammering away at it until the bugs are gone. It strikes me it would be hard to achieve with the latter.

If the architecture is good, whether it is a textbook use of C++ with objects, inheritance and templates, or something more modest/bespoke.

futhey 9 years ago |

Early versions of Google would be interesting to see (would be interesting to look at parts of a version of the engine that are still small enough to reason about).

citrusui 9 years ago | |

I'd have to second this. Especially how they manage to support nearly every browser in existence by serving a (sometimes vastly) different Google homepage based on the user-agent.

zbuf 9 years ago |

The code that runs my dad's pacemaker.

Whether he (or I) would sleep at night after seeing it...

jazztoken 9 years ago |

Dwarf fortress. Incredibly complicated simulation and procgen code written by a guy who admits to having very little engineering knowledge.

SOLAR_FIELDS 9 years ago | |

I think he has spoken about his development methodology and codebase in interviews. From what I remember based on his description it would horrify any professional engineer who saw it but it seems to work for him.

Here is the AMA where he briefly touches on some of his implementations:https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_...

btschaegg 9 years ago | | |

This is the reason DF sprang to mind for me, too. From what I gather, tools like Dwarf Therapist work by directly manipulating the game's memory. If it were open source, I'm sure there would be some halfway sane plugin system by now.

Also, having the source code would mean that one could compile it for ARM devices...

axonic 9 years ago |

The firmware from the international version of the Samsung Galaxy S3 which has unexplainable access to storage devices and such while the phone is powered down. I wanna know what was really going on there...

soulchild37 9 years ago |

Roller Coaster Tycoon, to this date it still amaze me that Chris Sawyer wrote almost the whole game using Assembly

nerdponx 9 years ago | |

That blows my mind. Old-school game development is fascinating.

smilesnd 9 years ago |

All the video games blizzard makes specially Starcraft 2 and Overwatch. They just seem to not struggle in lag department as other games. And for the massive world World of Warcraft it keeps state amazingly compare to other mmorpg's. Plus the networking seems to be a step above most.

ahoka 9 years ago | |

WOW is dead simple TCP with smoke and mirrors.

giobox 9 years ago | | |

Is it though?

https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/300479

My understanding is the best video game netcode tends to rely upon UDP for gameplay, TCP introduces way too much overhead to keep gameplay at its smoothest: far better to use UDP and get latest player data as fast as possible, lost packets be damned.

Tyrannosaur 9 years ago |

The engine behind Opera up until 2013: Presto. I understand why they moved to Blink, but I liked Presto so much better... The current Opera has the same memory issues Chrome does, and it is nowhere close to feature parity as the 2012 version.

An open source release would let the community help keep up development

whyagaindavid 9 years ago |

XP. Would love if somebody continued development in open way!

mabynogy 9 years ago | |

ReactOS is closed to NT: https://www.reactos.org/fr/

avar 9 years ago | |

The Window 2000 source code leaked. Not the same, but pretty damn close.

violinist 9 years ago |

Visual studio. I've heard that its design is beautiful and I think I'd learn a lot reading it.

tjalfi 9 years ago | |

Some Visual Studio support libraries are available on Github.

  https://github.com/Microsoft/vs-validation
  https://github.com/Microsoft/vs-mef
  https://github.com/Microsoft/vs-threading

demarq 9 years ago |

Sublime text!! I use it all the time

Artlav 9 years ago |

The one that runs the NSA's servers policing the internet.

ReligiousFlames 9 years ago |

VMware Fusion userland & kexts to see how they intercept IOKit USB connections.

jetti 9 years ago |

I would really be interested in seeing the source for IDA Pro. I would love to see how it interacts with each operating system.

saimiam 9 years ago |

Off topic but it's heartening to me that after 3 hours, this thread has no replies. To me, this could be because of two reasons -

1. People believe most of their favorite softwares are already open source OR 2. They don't think highly enough of closed source softwares to want to know their internals

wmil 9 years ago | |

I think it's more that there's plenty of interesting source code available to read through already and I personally have trouble thinking of a piece of software that I could go through in a reasonable time frame.

HaoZeke 9 years ago |

Matlab of course.

FullMtlAlcoholc 9 years ago |

Bayonetta or thr Ai code from F. E. A. R.

btschaegg 9 years ago | |

I don't know about the code, but the basic model behind F.E.A.R's AI has been explained in a couple of presentations, afaik.

Cf: http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear.pdf

fuzzycapacitor 9 years ago |

The firmware for the radio on my phone. Ideally I'd like it to be free software, not merely readable.

thomastjeffery 9 years ago |

To me, this is the wrong question. I don't want software to be open source so I can read it. I want my software to be free (as in liberty), so I can decide how to use it, rather than it use me.