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Comment by magicalist | Hacker News Reader

> Spidermonkey is one third of the size(LoC) of V8 and has three times more comments

Is that based on https://www.openhub.net/p/spidermonkey?

It says last analyzed two years ago, but the last commit it includes looks like it was in April 2011.

LoC is a silly measure for complexity anyways :) Does it include tests and test runners? Generated files? v8 is in its own repo while spidermonkey is in the main mozilla repo, so it's going to be difficult to compare well.

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I also think in many cases comments serve as a stand-in for poor design. These days, when I catch myself writing a comment, I try to think of whether I could choose a better name for a variable or method instead, or if I could add an assertion to clarify that an invariant holds in a particular location. Comment rot also makes ordinary code rot look like a walk in the park. Since comments aren't tested, they rot incredibly quickly without meticulous double-checking every time you modify the code. In a heavily-commented, older codebase this become super annoying, since every other line is a comment that, ten percent of the time, doesn't hold any more.

I think the problem of stuff going out of date can be avoided by giving background (why it was originally written) rather than making a commitment you can't keep about keeping it up to date.

Knowing why code was originally written can be more important than knowing what it currently does.

This is fantastic advice.

Great advice, and it does resonate. FWIW I'm certainly not a "no comments" guy. I just like to check myself to see if there is a better way to accomplish what I was going to do with a comment.

JS is full of fun facts, like that ++ is different than +=1, or that ToInteger may return negative zero.

Better naming can't justify these head-scratchers. As an implementor all you can do is write a loud! comment! referencing the spec, and add a test or two or a million.

Anything that implements a spec needs copious comments to justify the implementation. clang for example is chock-full of references to the C99 standard.

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