

Ask: famous Greenspun's Tenth Rule manifestations? - henning

Here are some examples I'm aware of of large software systems bucking at the brutally low-level nature of their implementation language:<p>- Mozilla/Firefox - XPCOM, a COM/CORBA-like thing the codebase has, implements message passing and garbage collection.<p>- (allegedly) Yahoo's rewrite of Viaweb<p>- X Windows, though I've never studied its source code so I don't know for sure<p>- Apache: implemented using the "Apache Portable Runtime" library that provides things like hash tables and memory mapping.<p>Are there any other instances you're aware of?
======
omouse
About X Windows...the last person to study its source code mysteriously died 7
days later: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ring_%282002_film%29>

------
DaniFong
Every time I pick a programming language to write contests in, I work on
extending the language more and more until, eventually, I hit a wall. C++
didn't allow closures, C# does have even simple macro-expansions, and then I
literally start writing an interpreter for Lisp.

------
aristus
Emacs. :)

The Yahoo/Viaweb story is correct, according to usually reliable sources.
Their fatal shoal was the RTML parser.

MySQL's parser and query planner are pretty suspicious, too.

