Hacker News Reader

But clean-room engineering is almost always slower than writing the software from scratch. Which, AFAICT, is what most companies actually do except in the rare case where they need to achieve interoperability with an existing product (like the early PC clones where bug-compatibility with the IBM PC was essential). Right?

View on HN

I don't know if it's slower or not. It takes a certain amount of time to develop a functional spec; you have a head start if you have a working example in front of you.

I think the main reason you don't see more clean-room reimplementations is simply, as you say, that level of compatibility is rarely necessary -- indeed, it's often considered undesirable, even by the users.

That doesn't make any sense. It is the same as writing the software from scratch. The only difference is that the behavior of the original software which is being copied is effectively the spec.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com