
Ask HN: Big bang refactor from 1M lines of php - ccvannorman
HN,<p>I&#x27;ve read, including on HN, that &quot;big bang&quot; refactors are never a good idea. However I&#x27;m talking to a client who has 1 million lines of awful PHP code to do what I think could be reduced to 100k or fewer in python&#x2F;Django.<p>I&#x27;ve built large codebases before and refactored chunks of them, but nothing at this scale. A piece by piece refactor to me sounds very tedious, considering the application is not terribly complex.<p>Thoughts &#x2F; suggestions?
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tlb
Spolsky's opinion: [http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/97052/How-To-
Survive-a-...](http://onstartups.com/tabid/3339/bid/97052/How-To-Survive-a-
Ground-Up-Rewrite-Without-Losing-Your-Sanity.aspx)

Experience with 2 parallel implementations:
[http://alexmartins.me/2016/07/28/lessons-learned-from-
softwa...](http://alexmartins.me/2016/07/28/lessons-learned-from-software-
rewrites.html)

