Audit of a Legacy C application – Microsoft Word 1.1a (I)

Microsoft has released this week the source code of Word 1.1a (1990) and I did analyze it. I was curious to see what would be the results, both in terms of quantitative metrics (size, complexity, documentation, duplications, etc.) and qualitative numbers (violations of best programming practices). Also, what would be the technical debt on this software.

Note that I am not looking to debug this Word release so I don’t need the best precision in my analysis. I just want to get an overall view of its quality and think to what can we learn from all of this.

There will be serveral posts. Here is the first one:

Enjoy!