
Ask HN: Which closed-source software would you most like to see the code for? - rxlim
I would choose Winamp 2 as the early versions of Winamp is exactly how I think software should be, and I also have great memories with it.
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toomuchtodo
\- US air traffic control software

\- Software that drives the NYSE and NASDAQ exchanges

\- SpaceX Dragon vehicle controller (primarily what calculates the boostback
trajectory on the fly)

EDIT: Honorable mention: The Knight Capital codebase [1]

Disclaimer: Please lawd don't let this put my on a watch list.

[1] [https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-08-02/knight-
sh...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-08-02/knight-shows-how-to-
lose-440-million-in-30-minutes)

~~~
tdb7893
I met someone who worked on air traffic control software and I think it would
be scary to see.

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zbuf
Renoise, music production software.

I've found it to be exceptionally stable and responsive; changes propagate
with live feedback right throughout the GUI.

I'd really like to see if its qualities are the result of great software
design, or just brute force and hammering away at it until the bugs are gone.
It strikes me it would be hard to achieve with the latter.

If the architecture is good, whether it is a textbook use of C++ with objects,
inheritance and templates, or something more modest/bespoke.

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futhey
Early versions of Google would be interesting to see (would be interesting to
look at parts of a version of the engine that are still small enough to reason
about).

~~~
citrusui
I'd have to second this. Especially how they manage to support nearly every
browser in existence by serving a (sometimes vastly) different Google homepage
based on the user-agent.

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zbuf
The code that runs my dad's pacemaker.

Whether he (or I) would sleep at night after seeing it...

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jazztoken
Dwarf fortress. Incredibly complicated simulation and procgen code written by
a guy who admits to having very little engineering knowledge.

~~~
SOLAR_FIELDS
I think he has spoken about his development methodology and codebase in
interviews. From what I remember based on his description it would horrify any
professional engineer who saw it but it seems to work for him.

Here is the AMA where he briefly touches on some of his
implementations:[https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_...](https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1avszc/im_tarn_adams_of_bay_12_games_cocreator_of_dwarf/)

~~~
btschaegg
This is the reason DF sprang to mind for me, too. From what I gather, tools
like Dwarf Therapist work by directly manipulating the game's memory. If it
were open source, I'm sure there would be some halfway sane plugin system by
now.

Also, having the source code would mean that one could compile it for ARM
devices...

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axonic
The firmware from the international version of the Samsung Galaxy S3 which has
unexplainable access to storage devices and such while the phone is powered
down. I wanna know what was really going on there...

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soulchild37
Roller Coaster Tycoon, to this date it still amaze me that Chris Sawyer wrote
almost the whole game using Assembly

~~~
nerdponx
That blows my mind. Old-school game development is fascinating.

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smilesnd
All the video games blizzard makes specially Starcraft 2 and Overwatch. They
just seem to not struggle in lag department as other games. And for the
massive world World of Warcraft it keeps state amazingly compare to other
mmorpg's. Plus the networking seems to be a step above most.

~~~
ahoka
WOW is dead simple TCP with smoke and mirrors.

~~~
giobox
Is it though?

[https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/300479](https://us.battle.net/support/en/article/300479)

My understanding is the best video game netcode tends to rely upon UDP for
gameplay, TCP introduces way too much overhead to keep gameplay at its
smoothest: far better to use UDP and get latest player data as fast as
possible, lost packets be damned.

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Tyrannosaur
The engine behind Opera up until 2013: Presto. I understand why they moved to
Blink, but I liked Presto so much better... The current Opera has the same
memory issues Chrome does, and it is nowhere close to feature parity as the
2012 version.

An open source release would let the community help keep up development

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whyagaindavid
XP. Would love if somebody continued development in open way!

~~~
mabynogy
ReactOS is closed to NT:
[https://www.reactos.org/fr/](https://www.reactos.org/fr/)

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violinist
Visual studio. I've heard that its design is beautiful and I think I'd learn a
lot reading it.

~~~
tjalfi
Some Visual Studio support libraries are available on Github.

    
    
      https://github.com/Microsoft/vs-validation
      https://github.com/Microsoft/vs-mef
      https://github.com/Microsoft/vs-threading

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demarq
Sublime text!! I use it all the time

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Artlav
The one that runs the NSA's servers policing the internet.

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ReligiousFlames
VMware Fusion userland & kexts to see how they intercept IOKit USB
connections.

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jetti
I would really be interested in seeing the source for IDA Pro. I would love to
see how it interacts with each operating system.

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saimiam
Off topic but it's heartening to me that after 3 hours, this thread has no
replies. To me, this could be because of two reasons -

1\. People believe most of their favorite softwares are already open source OR
2\. They don't think highly enough of closed source softwares to want to know
their internals

~~~
wmil
I think it's more that there's plenty of interesting source code available to
read through already and I personally have trouble thinking of a piece of
software that I could go through in a reasonable time frame.

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HaoZeke
Matlab of course.

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FullMtlAlcoholc
Bayonetta or thr Ai code from F. E. A. R.

~~~
btschaegg
I don't know about the code, but the basic model behind F.E.A.R's AI has been
explained in a couple of presentations, afaik.

Cf:
[http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear.pdf](http://web.media.mit.edu/~jorkin/gdc2006_orkin_jeff_fear.pdf)

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fuzzycapacitor
The firmware for the radio on my phone. Ideally I'd like it to be free
software, not merely readable.

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thomastjeffery
To me, this is the wrong question. I don't want software to be open source so
I can _read_ it. I want my software to be free (as in liberty), so I can
decide how to _use_ it, rather than it use me.

