daniel.haxx.se

Daniel Stenberg provides a follow-up status update on curl's ongoing code simplification effort. Over the past ten months, the most complex function in curl dropped from a cyclomatic complexity score of 100 to 59, and the average complexity across 171,000 lines of code fell from 20.8 to 15.9. Since 2022, the average complexity has dropped from ~46, with the top 25% of code (previously scoring above 60) now entirely below that threshold. The primary technique is splitting large, multi-purpose functions into smaller, focused sub-functions. While the benefits for security and readability are believed to be real, Stenberg acknowledges it's still too early to measure concrete outcomes from the effort.

decomplexification continued