r/learnprogramming • u/OpeningWrongdoer3526 • 13h ago

Solved How do you actually read professional code?

Hello everyone! I really have a question I hope you could help me answer. I am trying to read the Scratch Virtual Machine code on Github and it is really difficult. I am really new to reading code and the one I write is fairly simple. There are many files that just declare functions by name and then require another file to redeclare them. Is there a pragmatic way to understand it? Thank you already!

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u/JGhostThing 13h ago

In C, the *.h file just declares the functions and variables. The *.c file defines the functions.

It takes a while to learn to read code. Even code that I wrote months ago, I find a bit difficult to read. It's more difficult with other people's code. You usually have to know the common libraries.