Comment re-use overhead can be worse than re-inventing (Score 1) 158
Most of the time when I'm looking for source code, it's just to get some examples of how other people have dealt with a particular problem, or when figuring out how to use a new API. Only rarely have I been able to just drop in someone else's code and have it work as-is. There are usually dependencies/conflicts to work out, or incompatible parameters (arrays vs delimited buffer, etc). The sample code may also be tied to a sample GUI, which would need to be merged with my own. Or hacked severely to work as a console/server app. Many times, the time spent understanding the code well enough to modify it would have been better spent re-inventing the wheel.
This isn't to say that re-use is always bad. I've used things like pkzip and zlib libraries and saved a _lot_ of time (and some of my now-scarce sanity).
On the other hand, some libraries pack so many features (e.g. Stingray) that implementation can be rather involved. Nothing against Stringray -- they make some very difficult stuff fairly easy to do. But for the first project I used it on, we were only using a small subset of the capabilities and the overhead of learning the API, adapting to their updates/upgrades and rebuilding/distributing the library modules outweighed the advantages. Especially over the life of the project, which evolved from Visual Studio 6 on Win98 to VS.Net on XP. There's also been significant turnover in the development team over the years, adding to the learning curve.
This isn't to say that re-use is always bad. I've used things like pkzip and zlib libraries and saved a _lot_ of time (and some of my now-scarce sanity).
On the other hand, some libraries pack so many features (e.g. Stingray) that implementation can be rather involved. Nothing against Stringray -- they make some very difficult stuff fairly easy to do. But for the first project I used it on, we were only using a small subset of the capabilities and the overhead of learning the API, adapting to their updates/upgrades and rebuilding/distributing the library modules outweighed the advantages. Especially over the life of the project, which evolved from Visual Studio 6 on Win98 to VS.Net on XP. There's also been significant turnover in the development team over the years, adding to the learning curve.
