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Comment by Sunspark | Hacker News Reader

As someone who is not a C programmer, but is aware of the fact that the Transmission codebase is 15 years in, can someone state whether it is normal that after 15 years of work on the code, that it is so terrible it has to be changed? I'd like to think that if I worked on something for 15 years that it'd be pretty stable by that point.

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From the pull request, it was less that the C codebase is bad and more that the C++ STL has gotten better.

Not a C/C++ programmer either, but I got an example. InnoDB was first released in 2001, and was ported from C to C++ in 2011: https://github.com/mysql/mysql-server/compare/78f4351..3a455...

For a project that keeps being maintained, you want maintainable code that isn't a burden to work with. That's their rationale according to the PR. It's not that the code is bad, but it's more pedestrian than directly writing C++, so can lower the motivation of the involved people to actually work on the code and implement the things they want to implement.

Even if it is stable, it may have accreted many features over that time such that the code is now difficult to modify. Being able to leverage standard c++ stuff could be quite valuable, and could even result in less code (for them to maintain). They appear to be doing it very gradually, where the first step is probably little more than simply compiling the existing code as c++ instead of c.

Transmission probably should eventually be changed, so that support for BitTorrent V2 can be added. SHA1 collisions are only ever going to get easier, after all.

The question is too broad. It will depend on your situation and resources. If the code has been stable and secure for 15 years with a bit of maintenance? Why would you replace it? If you are adding new features or the code has become hard to maintain? The sure refactor and rewrite away. There is something to be said for using timetested code, but you should never turn it into a religion and remain practical and open to revising it if good reasons come along.

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