How would you dive into a big codebase

[Nicolas F via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Wednesday, 22 October 2014 at 02:09:53 UTC, Jonathan M Davis
wrote:
> The usual suggestion that I've heard given (without any 
> particular language in mind) is to start by tracking down and 
> fixing a bug in it

This is how I usually do it too, though you don't even need to
find a bug in it. Picking any feature and trying to find it in
the codebase and understand how it is implemented will usually
serve well as an entry point. To understand all of the code, I'd
start taking notes though, as they're useful to fall back on
later.

Either way, I wouldn't try to swallow all of it before starting
to work with the code. I've been working on codebases just fine
without understanding them in their entirety, as such is the
magic of code separation. I'm pretty sure there are real
codebases in the wild where nobody understands all of it. X11
comes to mind.