Florian HaasFeb 24

Serious question: as a user (not as a developer!), have you ever seen substantial improvement in a piece of a software from a ground-up rewrite?

In other words, have you ever used (but not co-developed) something where the developer(s) decided on stopping evolutionary work and instead embarked on a substantial rewrite, and the outcome as you saw it firsthand was a real improvement?

If so, please state your example. Please stick to personal experience, rather than hearsay. Thanks!

Show threadLars Marowsky-Brée 😷
@xahteiwi The rewrite of the dependency solver in the SuSE package manager, ultimately yielding zypper. What took minutes suddenly was done interactively.
Feb 24 at 9:50pmWeb
Show threadLars Marowsky-Brée 😷Feb 24

@xahteiwi YaST2 was a vast improvement over YaST.

All other examples I can recall were more than "just" rewrites by the same entity: more like clones or "new product based on lessons learnt".

Does drbd9 count, for example?

Show threadFlorian HaasFeb 24
@larsmb Hard pass on that question. 😀
Show threadLars Marowsky-Brée 😷Feb 24

@xahteiwi I meant for the qualifications.

In the end, I'd argue it definitely made things better.