[COFF] Re: Code/comment Ratios Style

On Mon, Jul 21, 2025 at 07:26:07AM +1000, Warren Toomey via COFF wrote: Well, in a long lived code base, comments can rot. I'd much rather have to read the code and figure it out than have a comment that is no longer true send me down a wild goose chase (it's happened more than I care to think about). I tend to comment structures quite a bit, globals and locals, have a block comment above the function saying what it is and it gets sparse from there. There may be inline comments but they need to do something a lot more useful than i++; // increment i <-- this sort of comment is worse than useless I also have a style that is int *p = 0; char *foo = 0; int ret = 0; // lots of code err: ret = -1; out: if (p) free(p); if (foo) free(foo); return (ret); } Most of the BitKeeper code follows that style, no unitialized pointers, we did use a lot of unless (p = malloc(whatever)) goto err; style of programming. Memory management in C is primitive so you have to adopt some consistent style to avoid errors just because someone did something different. I always said "optimize for reading, not writing". I've also said "anything that you wrote 6 months ago, you will approach it as if it is someone else's code".