Have you written very long functions? If so, why?

Question

I am writing an academic project about extremely long functions in the Linux kernel.

For that purpose, I am looking for examples for real-life functions that are extremely long (few hundreds of lines of code), that you don't consider bad programming (i.e., they won't benefit from decomposition or usage of a dispatch table).

Have you ever written or seen such a code? Can you post or link to it, and give explanation of why is it so long?

I have been getting amazing help from the community here - any idea that will be taken into the project will be properly credited.

Thanks,

Udi

Answer 1

The longest functions that I have ever written all have one thing in common, a very large switch statement. There are times, when you have to switch on a long list of items and it would only make things harder to understand if you tried to refactor some of the options into a separate function. Having large switch statements makes the Cyclomatic complexity go through the roof, but it is often better than the alternative implementations.