Ask HN: How does high quality source code from Google looks like?

7 points by andygrunwald 5 years ago | 5 comments

There is a lot of content out there regarding high-quality source code to write maintainable and clean code. This is not what I am looking for.

Every now and then, I read answers from Ex-Google Engineers on questions like "How is it like to be out of Google? What do you miss in the industry?". Often they say "the quality of source code".

I am curious: What is that special to the source code inside Google? What makes them "high quality"? Is it a well-commented code base? That people with less context get a grasp of what the piece of code is doing? Is it a strict following of company-wide coding guidelines? Is it the tooling around that supports the maintenance of the quality?

I am curious to hear answers from people who have experienced the code inside Google. And maybe have concrete examples?

Thanks all.

tony 5 years ago |

Go to https://github.com/google, but sort by language:

- C: https://github.com/google?q=&type=&language=c

- C++: https://github.com/google?q=&type=&language=c%2B%2B

- Go: https://github.com/google?q=&type=&language=go

- Java: https://github.com/google?q=&type=&language=java

Google's style guides: https://google.github.io/styleguide/

Hand-picked: https://source.chromium.org/chromium, https://android.googlesource.com/, https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/

Filter by subject: https://opensource.google/projects/explore/featured

Also you can do the same for https://github.com/microsoft and https://github.com/facebook

rwdim 5 years ago |

See for yourself :) https://github.com/golang/go

This is a good example file:

https://github.com/golang/go/blob/master/src/crypto/crypto.g...

andygrunwald 5 years ago | |

Thanks!

I am a huge fan of Go. My question here would be more like: Is this comparable? A lot of people outside of google contribute to Go. Are similar standards applied to the Go Review Process like to internally created software?

Wonnk13 5 years ago |

I think it says a lot more about how strict the readability standards are for submitting stuff to corp/production. Even code written by a moron by me looks decent after code review.

bjourne 5 years ago |

Find out for yourself by studying Cromium's, TensorFlow's or V8's source code. It's all available online. Most of the code for Android is too.