Ask Slashdot: Best Programs To Learn From? 329
First time accepted submitter camServo writes "I took C++ classes in college and I have played around with some scripting languages. We learned the basics of how to make C++ work with small programs, but when I see large open source projects, I never know where to even start to try and figure out how their code works. I'm wondering if any of you have suggestions for some nice open source projects to look at to get an idea for how programming works in the real world, so I can start giving back to the FOSS community." Where would you start?
Easy! (Score:4, Informative)
For C++ I would suggest Qt [nokia.com].
For C I would suggest Minix3 [minix3.org].
Re:The kernel (Score:4, Informative)
Um the "kernel" (by which I assume you mean Linux) is not written in C++.
It should be, but it isn't.
I mean, it's full of objects with derivation and virtual functions, and structs on which constructors and destructors have to be called for everything to remain in one peice. Seems odd not to use a language which is every bit as efficient, has a familiar syntax and yet does a large number of common tasks automatically and without errors.
Oh, and the other thing is that linux has the vtable inside the classes rather than a vptr, presumably because they syntactic overhead of a vptr is too high. C++ is by default significantly more memory efficient in this regard.