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legobmw99on Why not just do simple C++ RAII in C?

I feel like most RAII fans will openly admit that it’s the worst name in the world for such an idea. The idea is that any time you acquire a resource, you should initialize an object with said resource. But I guess “resource allocation should always lead to object initialization” is too long.

The reason to do this is precisely so that the resource can be cleaned up at destruction of the object. So even if you had an acronym like RASALTOI, it would still probably be misleading

legobmw99on How I stopped worrying and loved Makefiles

If you’re very careful with forward-vs-back slashes and your username isn’t “Firstname Lastname”, sure. But in practice there are tons of issues especially for non expert users

legobmw99on How I stopped worrying and loved Makefiles

I also wish I could make certain variables/flags part of the dependencies of a file, like if I have something with a lot of #defines that I really want to rebuild any time CPPFLAGS changes

legobmw99on XZ Utils review notes

I wouldn’t think they need to be if the releases are manually prepared and signed

legobmw99on GCC 14 Boasts Nice ASCII Art for Visualizing Buffer Overflows

How well do screen readers parse other compiler errors?

This isn’t me trying to be snarky, I actually have no idea! Reading a C++ template error is hard enough as a sighted person

legobmw99on What even is a JSON number?

If you use the same syntax as OP, C’s parser will also round that literal. The existence of a hex literal for floats is something orthogonal

legobmw99on XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."

This seems completely unrelated to the grandparent comment’s mention of open source LLMs

legobmw99on XZ backdoor: "It's RCE, not auth bypass, and gated/unreplayable."

Why would open source models make this scenario you are painting better?

legobmw99on The Ken Thompson Hack

Question from reading the abstract: how does one acquire this “second (trusted) compiler” when you are genuinely suspicious you are facing an adversary using an attack like this one?

legobmw99on Xz: Can you spot the single character that disabled Linux landlock?

I’m not quite following what the diff here is suggesting - was this some cmake magic to detect if a feature was enabled, but the file had an intentional syntax error?

legobmw99on The Ken Thompson Hack

One of my favorite short stories plays on the natural horror of this realization: https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/coding-machines/

legobmw99on The Ken Thompson Hack

Surprisingly, it took until last year for someone to actually ask Ken for the code: https://research.swtch.com/nih

legobmw99on XZ Utils Backdoor

You really have to feel for the author. Stepping aside for personal reasons and having someone else take up the mantle of a project is supposed to be a success story of open source - I myself have been on both sides of that process before.

For it to turn out like this is incredibly disappointing

legobmw99on Backdoor in upstream xz/liblzma leading to SSH server compromise

I believe they also do not include sub modules, which is a big disadvantage for some projects

legobmw99on NASA engineers make progress toward understanding Voyager 1 issue

Yes, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program

legobmw99on SymPy: Symbolic Mathematics in Python

Perhaps the commenter means something like reverse mode automatic differentiation?

Finite differences does indeed have stability issues, and even if you apply some tricks will only give you about half float precision

legobmw99on The Linux Kernel Prepares for Rust 1.77 Upgrade

That honestly doesn’t seem that horrible - particularly compared to some of the nigh-on-impossible tasks like bootstrapping GHC

(For the curious) https://elephly.net/posts/2017-01-09-bootstrapping-haskell-p...

legobmw99on The European regulators listened to the Open Source communities

TFA is about how they did make those exceptions in the final text

legobmw99on The European regulators listened to the Open Source communities

https://news.apache.org/foundation/entry/update-on-eu-softwa...

This appears to be the article intended. At the very least it contains the quoted sentence

legobmw99on Boeing withdraws bid for safety exemption for Boeing 737 MAX 7

Wasn’t this anti-stall software exactly what caused those two fatal crashes a few years back?

legobmw99on Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union

If you subscribe to a service from your phone, it does show up there. My MLB subscription is also usable from my computer, but because I bought it on my phone it’s manageable there.

Presumably if they decided to move that app to a 3rd party store exclusively, that goes away

legobmw99on Apple announces changes to iOS, Safari, and the App Store in the European Union

Unity also wanted it to be retroactive to some extent IIRC

legobmw99on Git commit messages are useless

I think they do, but in a workflow where “make small commits” is now “make small merge requests”. When the merge request is squashed and merged, the message matters (which they say), but if you’re iterating on one small feature with feedback of CI/reviewers, those individual messages are arguably way less important, if only because they won’t become part of the true history

legobmw99on My Journey Submitting to Cran

This gives a good overview of the pains in getting a package on to CRAN, but that is sadly only the beginning. If you end up getting users, the process described here becomes fractally bad for future updates, as you can also receive rejections for breaking any test in any dependent package.

Any test, in any package, even if it is using some regex on an error message and you updated the wording to remove a typo.

legobmw99on Beeper – Moving Forward

Without end to end encryption, because that is not part of the standard, as the grandparent comment said

legobmw99on Progress toward a GCC-based Rust compiler

Java and C# seem to have actually gotten the idea of multiple implementations correct, in the sense that I have never needed to worry about the specific runtime being used as long as I get my language version correct. I have basically never seen a C/C++ program of more than a few hundred lines that doesn’t include something like #ifdef WIN32 …

legobmw99on Typst – Compose Papers Faster

legobmw99on Why does unsafe multithreaded std:unordered_map crash more than std:map?

The author of left_right has a really great YouTube channel on Rust programming: https://youtube.com/@jonhoo

legobmw99on Running the "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Compiler

Reminds me of https://elephly.net/posts/2017-01-09-bootstrapping-haskell-p...

The difficulty of bootstrapping GHC

legobmw99on Implication for C++ [pdf]

Because C++ goes through the effort of letting you manually specify capture lists, I suspect they would never introduce a syntax which did not