On navigating a large codebase

Dark Created: 2020-11-01 Reading time: ~19 minutes A while ago, I’ve been working on a very large codebase that consisted of a few million lines of code. Large systems are usually a big mess and this one was no exception. Since this is a rather common problem in software engineering, I thought the internet would be littered with stories about this topic. There is a lot of talk about software carpentry, while software maintenance is rarely debated. Either large programs are being maintained by dark matter developers or nobody thinks that writing stories about large systems are interesting enough.