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Comment by antirez | Hacker News Reader

C has no problems splitting programs in N files, to be honest.

The reason FB (and myself, for what it is worth) often write single file large programs (Redis was split after N years of being a single file) is because with enough programming experience you know one very simple thing: complexity is not about how many files you have, but about the internal structure and conceptually separated modules boundaries.

At some point you mainly split for compilation time and to better orient yourself into the file, instead of having to seek a very large mega-file. Pointing the finger to some program that is well written because it's a single file, strlongly correlates to being not a very expert programmer.

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The file granularity you chose was at the perfect level for somebody to approach the source code and understand how Redis worked. It was my favorite codebases to peruse and hack. It’s been a decade and my memory palace there is still strong.

It reminded me how important organization is to a project and certainly influenced me, especially applied in areas like Golang package design. Deeply appreciate it all, thank you.

I split to enforce encapsulation by defining interfaces in headers based on incomplete structure types. So it helps me with he conceptually separated module boundaries. Super fast compilation is another benefit.

Reminds of one time when I was pair programming and the other chair said “let’s chop this up, it’s too long” and when I queried the motivation (because I didn’t think it was too long), it was something like, “I’m very visual, seeing the file tree helps me reason about internals”. Fair enough, I thought at the time, whatever makes us more productive together.

On reflection, however, I’m unsure how that goes when working on higher-order abstractions or cross-cutting concerns that haven’t been refactored, and it’s too late to ask.

> complexity is not about how many files you have, but about the internal structure and conceptually separated modules boundaries.

You probably don't need this, but ...

https://www.lelanthran.com/chap13/content.html

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