While reading through the Elasticsearch (Java search engine) source code a while ago I found this gem:

return i == -1? -1: i;

I think someone should stop drinking while coding.

Some other nice lines:

int i = 0;
return j + 1000 * i;

Are these guys high?

I didn't expect the tag

@Alice there are 2 lines in between but i isnt changed or accessed in any way. I guess it once had a non zero value and somebody forgot to remove it.

Have you created a pull request yet?

The compiler should be able to recognice/fix this, right?

never trust the compiler! @Wack

@vadimir but my "Computer Architecture and Systems Programming" teacher allways tells us that the compiler is our friend!

@irene why not? It's a pretty quick fix, so that should be optimizable, hell a c++ compiler even replaces a recursive call to a function calculating fibonacci, if it detects that it's called by a constant, with just the result. So those should be fixable too...

@irene so let's say you have a funtion to calculate fibonacci something like
function int calculate(n){
if (n < 2) {return 1;}
return calculate(n-1)+calculate(n-2);
}

And it's somewhere called with something like
int n = 2*3;
int result = calculate(n);

A compiler will know n is static, and won't change, so first it replaces that line with
int n = 6;
It will also replace the line with the result woth simply
int result = 13;
As it will follow recursive functions up to some point if it sees a static input to them. Compilers are smart. Compilers are your friend.

@host127001 where is this gem buried? Which version?

@avalanche cant remember, it was half a year ago. Should be 5.something

Does reading The source of OSS actually make you a better coder? I remember I read a few years ago the code for Hadoop but all I see is lots of interfaces and methods calling other methods which eventually comes down to methods that contain a few lines of code and not clear what exactly it's doing and why it's a method that seems to just swap some variables...

@billgates that's a pretty interesting question!

I've seen a ton of open source projects with really bad (code) quality, so I can only hope that nobody considers them a "role model".

The more abstract code you mentioned has _probably_ higher code quality, but one has to really dive into the source code to understand how things work. Disclaimer: Code with abstractions and interfaces can be really really bad, too ;)

You can't have it both ways I guess...