Computer Programming General

friffri

A thread to talk about all things related to computer programming.
Interesting articles, personal opinions on languages/tools/libraries/whatnot, projects you're working on or whatever else you think it's cool.

Some starter questions to get the ball rolling:
What is/are the programming languages you're most comfortable using?
What areas of programming (meaning things like web development, systems programming, AI stuff etc.) are you most interested in?
What's the dumbest thing you've ever done as a beginner?

mechap

friffri
What is/are the programming languages you're most comfortable using?
Probably C/C++. I have been using it for most of my projects and while it's not perfect, it's still the language I am the most comfortable using. I also like the idea that C++ contains many sublanguages that are turing complete (syntactical macros, template instantiation, lambdas, ...). It is relatively easy to make the compiler crash.
I am also interested in functional languages such as haskell/ocaml and to some extent dependently typed languages that can be used as a basic proof assistant to encode first order logic propositions.

What areas of programming (meaning things like web development, systems programming, AI stuff etc.) are you most interested in?
Computer graphics, compilers architectures, and automated theorem proving.

What's the dumbest thing you've ever done as a beginner?
When I was a total beginner with C++, I used to write a deletion queue class instead of using destructors to handle deallocation of resources.

friffri

What is/are the programming languages you're most comfortable using?
C and Python are my go-to languages: they have a lot of issues but I feel like I know most of the corners of the languages so I very rarely get the feeling of "what the fuck is happening here" due to the language itself. They also cover 99% of the stuff I like to do with programming

What areas of programming (meaning things like web development, systems programming, AI stuff etc.) are you most interested in?
I like low level programming and in the last year I started getting into embedded development which is pretty neat.

What's the dumbest thing you've ever done?
For a school project I developed a social network App which let people take a photo and upload it with the location they were in the moment. The idea was that if someone else opened the app in the same location then they could see those pics.
All good, except the way I stored and downloaded photos was pretty dumb: my app would take a picture using the Camera APIs, which returned an uncompressed Bitmap. It would then take the byte representation of the image and convert it into Base64 and send it to the backend, which would store it directly in an SQL database.
Whenever someone opened their app they would query the backend with their position, and the backend would return all the pics as Base64 strings. The app would then decode the Base64 strings into Bitmaps and draw them to the screen.
This worked fine when I was testing by myself but of course it completely blew everyone's phones once there were more than a few pics in the same location. The app was going out of memory, this was back when everyone's phones had like 512MB of RAM.

Here's an interesting link to the "Nintendo 64's Programming Manual": https://ultra64.ca/files/documentation/online-manuals/man-v5-1/

Did you know that games on the N64 ran under a lightweight operating system? The OS scheduled threads which communicated with each other via message passing. The scheduling was cooperative and there was no memory protection at all. Neat!

kurisu

What is/are the programming languages you're most comfortable using?
I'm not entirely sure, I'm quite comfortable with C#, Python, Javascript and recently, with PHP too. I still need to find out what my "real go-to" would be, so I'm planning on learning some more stuff this summer (especially because I'd love to try out stuff like low level learning, or using something like Qt to make interfaces that just work on desktop).

What areas of programming (meaning things like web development, systems programming, AI stuff etc.) are you most interested in?
I've always liked web development, but I've always hated stuff like React and Angular, since they feel quite bloated (he said, while booting up laravel). Jokes aside, I'm looking forward to trying out Svelte, from what I've heard, it's quite light and does stuff on the serverside, which is what I like about PHP. I also can't deny my love for systems/devops, serverside development, and frontend.

What's the dumbest thing you've ever done as a beginner?
Probably the one time I spent an entire night before a deadline trying to parse the data from an SQL response to PHP variables, but I couldn't do it at all. Guess why? Because my dumbass didn't remember that SQL responses are an array of all the results, and I had to specify that I wanted the number 0. Fml.

I'm looking forward to learning more about low-level languages once I have some more free time and I'm not extremely busy with all these things I have deadlines for ^^'

friffri

While I was searching how to add unit testing to my project, I found this very tiny library which uses a neat trick to generate the list of tests to run without having the programmer write that out explicitly

https://github.com/PalmeseMattia/Xtal/blob/723931f6575af70977745e5875993dcfa87f114d/xtal.h#L12-L15

Basically the #TEST macro, which wraps each unit test declaration, also creates for each test a parallel function called register_#test which adds the function pointer and its name to a global array, which is what get processed by the run_test function in the main afterwards. All of these register_#test are marked as constructors using __attribute__((constructor)) , which means they run automatically before main.

I didn't know about __attribute__((constructor)) but when you think about it its not even necessary, you could replicate the same thing by creating a class which has that same function as constructor and immediately create a global object of that class below.
Funnily when I was playing with this library I tried replacing the C+realloc array with an std::vector and it was not working anymore because the std::vector constructor was running after all the others and once it ran it cleared the vector back to empty. So yeah, neat trick but also easy to shoot yourself with this thing

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