Refactoring rant

Refactoring 3rd party libraries is a criminal waste of time.

a) you may introduce new bugs while rewriting the code. Since you did not write the original code, they will be quite difficult to find and fix.

b) if a new version of the 3rd party library gets released, you have to either refactor it again, or live with the previous version. This possibly prevents you from getting important bug fixes or optimizations.

c) it is a complete illusion to believe you will understand the 3rd party code just because it follows your coding standard.

If you don’t know anything about the separating axis theorem, there is no way you will really “understand” an OBB-OBB overlap test. You will understand a given line, locally, but you will not understand why it is there, and how the algorithm works, globally. Finding a bug within the code is not going to be easier just because it follows your coding conventions (in particular if the bug is like this one).

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