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Ask HN: Why is code from chip manufacturers of such a low standard?
I have had the unfortunate to work with a lot of C code from chip manufacturers such as ST, Microchip(Atmel), Bosch, Semtech. More often then not the code quality is rather low[0], sometimes even embarrassing.
Perhaps I am just unlucky and only seen the bad parts, but it seems like a good business plan to provide a decent driver/library before spending a single dollar on marketing?
Or at a minimum, have a experienced programmer review what is released as "official" to avoid shaming the company name.
Can anyone explain this?
[0] To avoid offending anyone I do not want to link repos, but here are some examples of "low code quality":
- Libraries that looks like internal test code renamed and pushed to github.
- Using bit-fields for registers. Well, it will probably work even though it is implementation defined. It is however a strong indicator the programmer(s) are relative new to C which manifest itself in all kinds of other issues.