League of Legends Dev Tracker

(2021) Keeping Legacy Software Alive: A Case Study

This thread was added on February 24, 2021, with posts from Penrif.

Original Post
https://technology.riotgames.com/news/keeping-legacy-software-alive-case-study
Puuksu

This article was scary to read.

It was scary to write too.

deathspate

So Riot...about that last sentence? I would say I'm interested to be polite, but fuck no lmao. This shit sounds like some real tech-gore.

Fair enough!

phoenixrawr

Rigorous documentation of internal code is fairly uncommon and developers are moving further away from that practice over time as the pace of development increases and documentation gets outdated faster than before. It’a a lot of time and effort to invest in something you might never look at until you throw it away because the software changed and it’s not relevant anymore.

Important to pair with that though the practice of writing code to a human reader. If the code is going to be the documentation, I would argue it is more important that it be understandable to a human than be perfectly set up to be optimal to a computer.