Christine Lemmer-Webber18h ago

"A single-file C allocator with explicit heaps and tuning knobs" on the frontpage of HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47520807

Oh sounds nice and lightweight, good to have more allocator options

Oh wait this is 10k lines long and one commit and this person's first project

Oh look so many parentheses it makes me, a lisper, feel overwhelmed https://github.com/xtellect/spaces/blob/master/spaces.c#L4713

So tired of bumping into slop everywhere

A single-file C allocator with explicit heaps and tuning knobs | Hacker News

Show threadTrammell Hudson18h ago
@cwebber you can "Abort, Retry, Ignore?" allocation failures. https://github.com/xtellect/spaces/blob/422dbba85b5a7e9a209aaab2e9ac19c892528d39/spaces.c#L1040
Show threadTrammell Hudson
@cwebber did you know that if you wrap if statements with double curly braces they get extra special secret powers? https://github.com/xtellect/spaces/blob/422dbba85b5a7e9a209aaab2e9ac19c892528d39/spaces.c#L1649
Mar 28 at 5:57pmWeb
Show threadRob Ricci16h ago
@th @cwebber did you know that code runs faster if you just barf the same values all over the place instead of using constants?
Show threadGeoff Coffey15h ago

@th @cwebber Haha this is giving me flashbacks to my job in 1999 where the company maintained their own windows terminal. Why? Because they liked the row of buttons. That’s what they told me anyway. Reading its code was like peering into the ancient frustrations of a once-junior engineer.

flush();
flush(); // just in case

flush();
flush();
flush(); // this one worked

Show threadDawn Ahukanna15h ago

@th @cwebber

How does anyone “brag and boast” about such syntactic garbage?
and
worse, how does the so-called “intelligent” system produce this nonsense (that has been “imprinted” by most, if not all publicly available code)?

Show threadsarah tonin 14h ago

@th @cwebber im unsure if this is shitty bc it's slop or not slop bc it's so shitty this kind of thing cannot be in an llm's training data

like, usually slop looks right. it isn't, but it looks right. that's exactly why it's dangerous. but this ? i have no idea