Openstack is so large it also has a plethora of examples of bad code. Especially in vendor-contributed drivers and such. I wouldn't pay attention to the code so much as the incredible infrastructure and process that manages it and improves it over time.

Seriously, I've seen "sychronization threads" that use no synchronization primitives that have a single bare exception handler trap the critical section. The handler just restarts the computation... leading to fun times.

Cinder also has an interesting problem in the explosion of ABC "mixins" used for constructing a backend driver. It went from 5 in the previous release to something like 25 presently. A patch to fix it: https://review.openstack.org/#/c/201812/

But even the process isn't perfect. I've seen patches that change a couple of log lines get dog-piled with -1 nit-picks about inconsequential wording and take months to get through.

Openstack is an interesting beast but it's not a good example if you're just learning, IMO.

I happen to agree, Ive been working on it for the past year and its sort of killed my drive to work with something 'big' again.

That being said Barbican is quite good, which I think is due to its proof of concept being written in Go[1] before being ported.

If you want to learn decent testing Openstack is a good example, the code as a whole not so much. This also only applies if you want to use unittest or their custom test module, testtools. py.test is a much nicer way to do testing IMO

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=245rSZBdm9s

I still don't get it why they only write in Python (Horizon also has Less, JS) However a lot of code would be way cleaner / clearer when they wouldn't use Python that much. Especially when looking at Horizon. They use Django mainly to use Django, they nearly need nothing from Django at all. The most things they did were quite hacky. I mean horizon is full of magic to do really simple things. And especially a lot of code got glued together over time..

Hey, thanks for that type of input. This is exactly why I posed the question on HN. I really have no idea on how to judge Python code, so that's why I put the question to the community. I am looking for good code, but I don't (can't) know it when I see it, so I trust you guys to lead me to it.

Thank you for all the good replies peeps!

Cool, thanks, didn't realize openstack was Python. It may be too much for me to take on at my level, but it is definitely on my 'to look at' list.

Cheers!