Revision vs Rewriting

[geniusberry]

Hey, I was just wondering, for future reference, at what point do you rewrite old code, instead of continually revising it?

[metulburr]

When revisions makes it hard to read or a rewrite would simplify it, ,and i have the time to rewrite. As you progress, every year your last year's code will look horrible. Not everything has to be rewritten, its the process of learning to program.

[Computergeek01]

Me personally? Far less often then I should.

[Stewbond]

For my team, far too often.

Every time a new engineer gets assigned to a task, they look at the in-place code and say that it needs to be rewritten. I lead a group of 20 engineers, and EVERY time, without exception, the new guy says that it'll take less time to re-write than correct, or sometimes less time to re-write than to read. I have to avoid re-assigning tasks and need to hold on to the original authors just to avoid spending 80% of my time refactoring in order to actually get something done.

[NoXzema]

Rewriting is always more time consuming. I've learned this first hand.

But in some cases, it can be justified. For instance, there's a few rewrites currently happening for a few noticeable projects. One is the Open Broadcaster Software which is being re-written as obs-studio.

Usually, a rewrite is only wanted if there's major design changes. There needs to be very specific reasoning as to want to change a design, not just, "because its stupid" or "I don't like it" else you tend to just waste time implementing the same exact thing in a different way.

[3hM2Nwbp]

Generally, I only rewrite things when a new standard is published to take advantage of constructs that vastly improve the code. IE template aliases instead of a boat-load ^of specialized typedefs.