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Comment by danielwmayer | Hacker News Reader

The name of this is a reference to the incredibly useful godbolt compiler explorer. If you are interested in this you will likely enjoy the other as well:

https://godbolt.org/

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and for those who don't know it, that one is named after the author, Matt Godbolt.

I thought for a longtime it was some joke I wasn't getting related to deities smithing people.

Damn. To just name something your last name.

I thought it was the sibling part to the Jesus Nut. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_nut

Could be misremembering, but IIRC it was called Compiler Explorer and used to live only on a subdomain of godbolt.org. But, it was so useful that it became presumably vastly higher traffic than the personal homepage part and people often referred to it as just "Godbolt" probably because it sounds cooler and is shorter than saying "Compiler Explorer" (and it may not be obvious the domain name is a last name rather than just a cool name for something.)

Now that’s a pretty cool origin story for a name. What a compliment!

It's never been called anything but either "GCC Explorer" or "Compiler Explorer", by me, anyway... The URL it's accessible for is an accident of the one I had hanging around :) (it's now available at compiler-explorer.com too, but...the name other people use has stuck so I'll never be able to reclaim my own domain...)

It’s such a memorable name for a tool like that. Other than losing your domain name to the topic, how do you feel about the de facto name?

To a far far lesser degree, I’ve experienced many examples of “you named it X but everyone at work calls it Y and now you have to live with that.” It used to really irk me for some reason.

I think you _could_ reclaim your own domain if you wanted. You'd want to have a banner at the top with a clear note directing people to the new domain for the compiler explorer, so that people realize immediately that you're not domain squatting. A few people might put up a stink, but I'm pretty confident that most people wouldn't mind, especially since the tool itself is so useful. The name, for those who don't know it as your last name, is fun, but it isn't the reason people use the tool. Eventually, over enough time, people would start remembering the new URL, and you could shrink or remove the banner (and/or put a note elsewhere on the page).

Honestly "godbolt" is so memorable I can find it instantly even though I rarely use it; but "compiler-explorer" sounds like some generic SEO spam site that I'd probably never click on.

Even then the internet (and even books) are full of "godbolt" links, to the tool itself, to specific code samples. Till all those became irrelevant will take quite some time.

As a data point: Search on stack overflow yields "500" hits. https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=godbolt

Links to specific examples are less of a problem as he could redirect those to compiler-explorer.com and just keep that redirect up forever. Really the only URL that would need to be "reclaimed" is https://godbolt.org/ and having a prominent link to compiler-explorer.com thee would solve that issue.

OTOH the godbolt domain is at least not actively used for a number of other TLDs getting one of those might be an easier option.

It is fantastic name of an otherwise fantastic tool. The day I found it was your last name made me chuckle and liked it even more. And since I am here, thank you very much for it!

I always call it the compiler explorer but the url, as a sibling comment says, is memorable.

To be fair it's an amazing last name and it feels like there probably is a story, it just has to do with this guy's ancestors rather than the assembler tool we all know and love.

> deities smithing people.

That's "deities smiting people.", but I really like the idea of deities smithing people :)

There's a joke about Adam and Eve in here somewhere. Genesis 2 for reference.

Sculpty terracotta would be a fitting choice. It's pretty easy to sculpt when kneaded, bakes in a traditional oven, keeps it's details. Perfect for silicone mold making.

> bakes in a traditional oven

Now that reminds me of a verse from a song I heard on the radio as a teenager:

  Had a meeting with my maker
  The superhuman baker
  He popped me in the oven
  And set the dial to lovin'

This happens in the Norse myths.

The Dwarven god in DnD is so good at crafting he can literally make new souls in his forge. :)

There's also RMSbolt, which is a Compiler explorer for Emacs, where Richard M. Stallman is regarded as the "creator".

It makes for a nice parallel, since the original version of godbolt was just a split tmux session with vim running on one side, and "watch 'gcc -S -o /dev/stdout'" on the other. The main advantage of putting it online is not needing all of the compilers locally.

> Richard M. Stallman

That's St IGNUcius to you.

[0] https://stallman.org/saint.html

It might also be a bit of a portmanteau with a second reference to dogpile.com which was a pre-Google "search engine" that compiled search results from multiple search engines. Back in the day you often had to separately search altavista.com, lycos.com, askjeeves.com, yahoo.com, etc. because some of them would work for your query but others would not and it was difficult to predict the performance of any particular search engine, but usually at least one of them would have the result you wanted/needed.

Dogpile was an automated way to search all of the search engines at the same time with one query.

https://web.archive.org/web/19990429194414/http://dogpile.co...

I do remember dogpile, but as one of the folks who named it, nope, that wasn't a conscious influence!

Oh, it you! Hi Jordan I miss you let’s hang out sometime :)

Yes, lets! And before hacker summer camp when we're way way too busy! :-)

Look no further than https://dogbolt.org/faq

> It's meant to be the reverse of the amazing Compiler Explorer.

With a link to https://godbolt.org/

It’s very obvious that Dogbolt Decompiler Explorer is primarily named after Godbolt Compiler Explorer.

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