Quote from: farmer_boy on December 11, 2010, 10:20:55 PM

I am sure it is possible to reverse-engineer it in a few months to get it into a state in which one can just read through the whole program in an hour or so, but that's not the same as it already being in such a state.

I agree with you on this. It's hard to understand. It lacks comments. But I don't agree it's bad code per-se. I haven't read anything in the code yet that screams 'baaad design'.

If you're going to put in the effort to understand it: At least I'd prefer some good spec / documentation to 'cleaned up, but still hard to read' C++ (or D, a language I don't even know) any day.
That way, people can implement clients in language-agnostic ways.

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Monolithic, code in header files, all units very tightly coupled, misuse of templates (when simple inheritance would do).

This is very subjective, my first reaction when looking at the code was also *ouch*. But then I remembered it's C++:

Putting your code in headers is a valid code style in C++. It allows current compilers to do a better job in optimization, and for templates (in general) it's required as they can't be exported between compilation units.

Boost is almost entirely written this way, so are quite a few other modern C++ libraries. They also prefer the functional programming approach using templates to 'simple inheritance'.

I agree it's not pretty and hard to get used to, but it is a result of C++'s method of separation between code and interfaces (IE, none at all).

Again, I'd rather have a readable spec.