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  • Is the original developer still available to decipher the code? This would heavily influence my decision making. The only thing you said in the question that was scary (rather than just sad) was, "will be used in production this summer". I can only hope not. Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 2:40
  • The original author is still at the company, and I've been given carte blanche from management to do anything necessary to get this codebase production ready and maintainable. The original author will be required to work with me, but he is also very proud of what he built (and rightfully so, as it performs a very important analysis). I want to make sure that whatever I do, I don't offend the original author in the process of this. Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 2:55
  • 200KLOC, that's 500 days if programming at 400LOC/day. So 2 years of work. If you're alone. And if you clearly know what is to be done. Maybe it's worth after all to look at the root cause of the leaks? Or to refactor progressively, as Kain suggests... Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 7:47
  • In Things You Should Never Do, Part I, Joel Spolsky, one of the two founders of Stack Overflow, argues that rewriting code from scratch is usually the worst thing you can do. Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 8:16
  • 1
    I agree with Joel's stance of never rewriting a big project and with the answers in that direction, so I won't repeat that in an answer. However I want to add the advice that you should get the "Working with legacy code" book from Michael Feathers. I'm not a book person and that's one of maybe 2 books I would actually advise other programmers to get. It's old, but it's almost like it gets better with age. Even if you don't work on legacy code it's incredibly helpful, and which programming language you use doesn't really matter either. Commented Feb 18, 2020 at 21:11