Many Freedesktop-projects have very beautiful/elegant/professional/clear C code, e.g.: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/amd...

Also Blender, Chrome, FFmpeg, LLVM are examples for large and long scale projects codebases, that are almost like old vs. new brain, meaning there are old low-level codelines and on top of those cumulates all kinds of abstractions.

Geohot's tinygrad is great example of booting up codebase from scratch: set conscious goal for small max lines of code (e.g. 1k), then code the next state of working implementation, then clean and refactor it to cut the fat off. It feels that code wants to shape to specific form and size depending on goal.

Linux? I don't understand anything about it so it's sexy. Like girls, I never understood them.

In C++, I find Cap'n Proto very impressive: https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto

Anything created by the Pallets team: https://github.com/pallets

All OSS code is exemplary.

Of course, some of it fits one meaning of the word and some fits the other meaning.

Is well-written code “sexy”? I’m not so sure about that.

OpenBSD

Code readability is directly related to the quality of its contextual documentation. I've been experimenting with documentation following MECE principles, which has greatly improved the maintainability of my projects.

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