Shafik Yaghmour

@shafik.bsky.social

1004 Followers 242 Following

Compiler Engineer clang front end. Interests: C++, C, and undefined behavior. Martial Artist, Book Worm and Dad. he/him Mastodon: https://hachyderm.io/@shafik Blog: https://shafik.github.io/ #cplusplus #compilers

Maybe the real monster in the Alien franchise isn't actually the killer alien. Because behind the acid blood and jump scares is an even more insidious horror: a single employer with unchecked power. That employer is named Weyland-Yutani, a mega-corporation that dominates workers across the galaxy.
This is the story of how I found 10,000 repositories on GitHub that distribute Trojan malware. They are all from different contributors, have different names, and are not forks of other repositories. But they share a common pattern, which is what allowed me to write a script to find such repositories.
The PACs may look different from the outside, but they’re increasingly the same operation with aligned goals: deregulate the tech sector, slash consumer protections, and allow tech companies to capture even more enormous profits at the expense of everyday people. So I’ve expanded the site to track both. It’s now called Tech Influence Watch, and it documents more than $400 million (and counting) in contributions from crypto and AI companies and their executives this election cycle. When two industries with shared backers and shared operatives are spending this much to write their own regulations, someone needs to be watching.
So you see the new interesting ingredient products are using and assume it must have been tested and safe. Wow, you are so so wrong. The tara flour case is crazy. Many many people were poisoned and dozens had to have their gallbladders removed. You will learn about the GRAS loophole and the Secret GRAS loophole. If you guessed these are not good for consumers you would guess correctly. I did not know these details but I always avoid any new ingredient being pushed b/c I assume many of them we will learn of weird issues only years or decades later. Our food/product history has so many examples, it is not worth my well being to test it.
However, in speaking to maintainers privately, I learned that these initiatives frequently cause them to seize with anxiety, because such initiatives often attract low-quality contributions. This creates more work for maintainers—all contributions, after all, must be reviewed before they are accepted. Maintainers frequently lack infrastructure to bring these contributors into a "contributor community"; in many cases, there is no community behind the project at all, only individual efforts. In my conversations with maintainers, I heard them express a genuine conflict between wanting to encourage newcomers to participate in open source and feeling unable to personally take on that work. Maintainers simply don't have the energy to onboard every person who shows passing interest. Many told me they were frustrated by prior attempts to cater to a revolving door of contributors-sometimes hundreds of them-who didn't stick around. Maintainers recounted how those who'd expressed interest sometimes disappeared before they'd even submitted their first contribution. I started to see the problem is not that there's a dearth of people who want to contribute to an open source project, but rather that there are too many contributors-or they're the wrong kind of contributors.
Then we hit a snag. Suddenly, there was too much information. Too many notifications made us want to check them less. Too many social interactions made us want to post online less frequently. Too many emails made us not want to answer. We were, effectively, Dosing one another: the term for a distributed denial-of-service attack, in which malicious actors overwhelm their target by flooding it with traffic, leaving the victim incapacitated. Our online public lives became too much to handle, causing many of us to shrink back into our private spheres. There's a similar story playing out in the world of open source software: a term that's nearly synonymous with public collaboration, but whose developers-who write and publish code that anybody can use-often report feeling overwhelmed by the volume of inbound requests.
GONZALEZ: Tom says the 1930s was kind of our window, our chance to get something like guaranteed paid vacation. But Tom says back then, some unions actually kind of drew a line at vacation. KOCHAN: There was also a view among unions that, look, we don't necessarily have to push for all of these things through legislation, because then if we did, then people might say, well, why do I need a union? GONZALEZ: Oh, so this is like-- this is like a known thing that unions, like, if we ask for everything at the federal level, there would be no point in unions? KOCHAN: Absolutely, the AFL, American Federation of Labor-- GONZALEZ: Oh, no. KOCHAN: --in particular, was very strong on saying this is for the private sector. This is for what unions exist to do. GONZALEZ: The plot thickens. We were sabotaged. No, but yeah, this is one of the interpretations for how things went down back then. And Tom says this
A mysterious enterprise just torched $500 million in a single month on Anthropic’s Claude AI platform, according to Axios reporting. The culprit? No usage limits on employee licenses, turning what should have been controlled experimentation into a financial bloodbath that makes your surprise Netflix subscription charges look quaint.
The fatality rate is roughly seven times higher when colliding with a heavy pickup truck than with a compact car. As the weight of your car increases, the risk of killing others increases dramatically.
void f1() { while ( ({ break; 1;}) ) {} } void f2() { for(;;) { while (({ break; 1;})); } }
-fno-assume-sane-operator-new Don’t assume that the C++’s new operator is sane. This option tells the compiler to do not assume that C++’s global new operator will always return a pointer that does not alias any other pointer when the function returns.
#315 Given the following in C++ static_assert(true,("")); // Well-formed? Without checking: A. Yes B. No
The invisible culprit behind this damaging phenomenon? Carbon dioxide pollution. Surging concentrations of carbon in the atmosphere, caused largely by burning fossil fuels, have produced potent changes in the way plants grow — from increasing their sugar content to depleting essential nutrients like zinc. Experts fear the degradation of Earth’s food supply will cause an epidemic of hidden hunger, in which even people who consume enough calories won’t get the nutrients they need to thrive.
Nearly all of the 20 state-run health insurance exchanges in the US have added advertising trackers that transmit user activity back to big tech companies, in some cases sending more data than state officials realized. Bloomberg News reviewed thousands of enrollment and informational webpages across these sites, as well as the Washington, DC exchange, and found personal data being shared on many of them. More than 7 million Americans bought health insurance for 2026 through these sites. The Washington exchange sent applicants’ sex and citizenship responses to TikTok, as well as some race data that the tracker failed to filter out. Virginia’s tool to estimate premiums sent ZIP codes to Meta Platforms Inc. In New York, the marketplace shared the pages applicants visited during enrollment with TikTok, Meta, Snap Inc. and Microsoft Corp.’s LinkedIn, including when they provided details about incarcerated family members. No federal data privacy law applies to these enrollment sites. State laws define sensitive data under a patchwork of rules, which privacy experts say are inadequate and inconsistent. “It is very harmful that these tracking technologies are so embedded in these sites because people would expect this information to be private,” said Sara Geoghegan, senior counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, citing research that indicates people alter their behavior online when they know they’re being surveilled.
That combination of fragmentation and lax reporting means that no one — including government authorities, asset managers and industry data providers — can say definitively how big the CIT market is, how its assets are allocated, or what the average investor pays to be part of it. The worry is that vital investor protections are being sacrificed in pursuit of lower costs and lesser oversight. Those concerns are likely to grow as CITs look set to become the go-to vehicle to add
Beyond the growing expenses of modern life, there is also a profound mathematical difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars. Imagine, as a thought experi-ment, that a millionaire tried to finance her life using only interest generated by her income (as many wealthy people endeavor to do). At a 3 percent interest rate, $1 million would return only $30,000 in income a year, barely enough to support a subsistence-level existence in most US cities. Meanwhile, $1 billion at 3 percent interest would produce an annual income of $30 million-enough to support even the most lavish lifestyle, all while preserving the principal, which could then be passed on to children, who can use the income to support their lifestyle.
Over the past forty years, the tax system has changed. Maintenance of the tax code has slowed, as has its enforce-ment. As private wealth has dramatically compounded, the redistributive promise of the tax code has been hamstrung by private interests that seek to prevent it from catching up to changes in society. The tax code has become a means for increasing concentrations of wealth as opposed to being a bulwark against it.
#313 Given the following in C++ static union { int x; }; // Well-formed? Without checking: A. Yes B. No
In successful open source projects you eventually reach a point where you start getting more PRs than what you’re capable of processing. Given what I mentioned so far, it would make sense to stop accepting imperfect PRs in order to maximize ROI from your work, but that’s not what we do in the Zig project. Instead, we try our best to help new contributors to get their work in, even if they need some help getting there. We don’t do this just because it’s the “right” thing to do, but also because it’s the smart thing to do. Contributing to an open source project is an iterated game and the majority of the value that a contributor can bring to a project lies in the later iterations. In other words, you initially invest some energy (i.e. place a bet) to onboard a new contributor, and you hope that later on that relationship starts paying you back as the contributor becomes more trusted and prolific.
Chollet argues that LLMs are not intelligent because they can’t generalize. In his widely read and cited 2019 paper “On the Measure of Intelligence,” Chollet quotes Legg and Hutter’s summarized definition: “Intelligence measures an agent’s ability to achieve goals in a wide range of environments.” This definition, Chollet says, describes two main components of intelligence: Task-specific skill The ability to generalize
The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language — and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own. Humans use language to communicate the results of our capacity to reason, form abstractions, and make generalizations, or what we might call our intelligence. We use language to think, but that does not make language the same as thought. Understanding this distinction is the key to separating scientific fact from the speculative science fiction of AI-exuberant CEOs. The AI hype machine relentlessly promotes the idea that we’re on the verge of creating something as intelligent as humans, or even “superintelligence” that will dwarf our own cognitive capacities. If we gather tons of data about the world, and combine this with ever more powerful computing power (read: Nvidia chips) to improve our statistical correlations, then presto, we’ll have AGI. Scaling is all we need. But this theory is seriously scientifically flawed. LLMs are simply tools that emulate the communicative function of language, not the separate and distinct cognitive process of thinking and reasoning, no matter how many data centers we build.
Crucially, however, there is a built-in trade off (or negative correlation) between effectiveness and novelty in token selection. The effectiveness of a token – its semantic appropriateness for a given prompt – demands a high token probability. On the other hand, the novelty of a token – its unusualness as a response for a given prompt – demands a low token probability. However, a token cannot be simultaneously both highly probable (effective) and highly improbable (novel). One can only come at the expense of the other (Figure 3). Consequently, the LLM is constrained, by design, to be either effective, or novel,but not both. What consequences does this have for the assessment of product
The executive explained that the benchmarks required to verify code simply haven’t caught up yet, which means companies leveraging AI may be flying by the seat of their pants by using AI to verify AI code, a potentially dangerous feedback loop.
Retro C++ quiz #57 Given the following in C++: #include <cstdint> #include <limits> int main() { int64_t s=32; int64_t x=std::numeric_limits<int32_t>::max(); 1 << s; // A 1 + x; // B } Without checking, assuming LP64, which invokes undefined behavior: A. Both B. None C. A D. B
INTERLUDE • Electric Meters in Dutch Houses Near Amsterdam, there is a suburb of single-family houses all built at the same time, all alike. Well, nearly alike. For unknown reasons it happened that some of the houses were built with the electric meter down in the base-ment. In other houses, the electric meter was installed in the front hall. These were the sort of electric meters that have a glass bubble with a small horizontal metal wheel inside. As the household uses more electricity, the wheel turns faster and a dial adds up the accumulated kilowatt-hours. During the oil embargo and energy crisis of the early 1970s, the Dutch began to pay close attention to their energy use. It was discovered that some of the houses in this subdivision used one-third less electricity than the other houses. No one could explain this. All houses were charged the same price for electricity, all contained similar families. • The difference, it turned out, was in the position of the electric meter. The families with high electricity use were the ones with the meter in the basement, where people rarely saw it. The ones with low use had the meter in the front hall where people passed, the little wheel turning around, adding up the monthly electricity bill many times a day. 13
There always will be limits to growth. They can be self-imposed. If they aren't, they will be system-imposed. No physical entity can grow forever. If company managers, city governments, the human population do not choose and enforce their own limits to keep growth within the capacity of the supporting environment, then the environment will choose and enforce limits.
It's a great art to remember that boundaries are of our own making, and that they can and should be reconsidered for each new discussion, problem, or purpose. It's a challenge to stay creative enough to drop the boundaries that worked for the last problem and to find the most appropriate set of boundaries for the next question. It's also a necessity, if problems are to be solved well.
Picture showing various goods and their inflation rates electricity since 2020 +41% Car insurance +56% Restaurants +35% Hospital Services +29% Daycare +39% Colleges +22% Beef and Veal +59% Home Prices +46%
Systems fool us by presenting themselves or we fool ourselves by seing the world-as a series of events. The daily news tells of elections, battles, political agreements, disasters, stock market booms or busts. Much of our ordinary conversation is about specific happenings at specific times and places. A team wins. A river floods. The Dow Jones Industrial Average hits 10,000. Oil is discovered. A forest is cut. Events are the outputs, moment by moment, from the black box of the system.
Right now, I’m glued to my phone. Like most people in the US, I get my news from various apps – social posts, podcasts, newsletters – and when things are blowing up (literally) I can’t look away. People in Minneapolis are posting video updates from protests; experts are publishing essays about international law and the US attack on Venezuela. I have to consume them all! The weirdest part, though, is that the more I watch and read what other people are saying, the lonelier I feel. This is hardly a new or unique experience. Sociologists have been talking about it for nearly 80 years. In 1950, scholars David Riesman, Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denney published a book called The Lonely Crowd, in which they argued that the rise of consumerism and mass media had led to a new kind of personality type that is deeply sensitive to loneliness. They called this personality “other-directed”, and their descriptions feel startlingly prescient in our era of social media and AI chatbots. Other-directed people are constantly attuned to what everyone around them is doing, using the preferences of their peer groups to decide what to buy, wear and think. Because their values come from peers, rather than elders or ancestors, they tend to be present-oriented and unconcerned with history. Riesman and his colleagues warned that other-directed people are obsessed with conforming, anxious to be “part of a crowd” and “having fun”. What other-directed people fear more than anything is being alone.
“Self-organization produces heterogeneity and unpredictability. It is likely to come up with whole new structures, whole new ways of doing things. It requires freedom and experimentation, and a certain amount of disor-der. These conditions that encourage self-organization often can be scary for individuals and threatening to power structures. As a consequence, education systems may restrict the creative powers of children instead of stimulating those powers. Economic policies may lean toward supporting established, powerful enterprises rather than upstart, new ones. And many governments prefer their people not to be too self-organizing.”
This capacity of a system to make its own structure more complex is called self-organization. You see self-organization in a small, mechanistic way whenever you see a snowflake, or ice feathers on a poorly insulated window, or a supersaturated solution suddenly forming a garden of crys-tals. You see self-organization in a more profound way whenever a seed sprouts, or a baby learns to speak, or a neighborhood decides to come together to oppose a toxic waste dump.
And, conversely, systems that are constant over time can be unresilient. This distinction between static stability and resilience is important. Static stability is something you can see; i's measured by variation in the condition of a system week by week or year by year. Resilience is something that may be very hard to see, unless you exceed its limits, overwhelm and damage the balancing loops, and the system structure breaks down. Because resilience may not be obvious without a whole-system view, people often sacrifice resilience for stability, or for productivity, or for some other more immediately recognizable system property.
Resilience arises from a rich structure of many feedback loops that can work in different ways to restore a system even after a large perturbation. A single balancing loop brings a system stock back to its desired state. Resilience is provided by several such loops, operating through different mechanisms, at different time scales, and with redundancy-one kicking in if another one fails.
In fact, just about any long-term model of a real economy should link together the two structures of population and capital to show how they affect each other. The central question of economic development is how to keep the reinforcing loop of capital accumulation from growing more slowly than the reinforcing loop of population growth—so that people are getting richer instead of poorer.*
“The human mind seems to focus more easily on stocks (levels of a good) than on flows. On top of that, when we do focus on flows, we tend to focus on inflows more easily than on outflows” “Everyone understands that you can prolong the life of an oil. based economy by discovering new oil deposits. It seems to be harder to understand that the same result can be achieved by burning less oil.”
"the last decade five decades. But let me make an interesting historical point and this is maybe due to my age. Uh there's been generation after generation of AI scientists since the 1950s claiming that the technique that they just discovered was going to be the ticket for human level intelligence. You you see declarations of Marvin Minsky, Newan Simon, um you know, Frank Rosenblad who invented the perceptron, the first learning machine in 1950 saying like within 10 years we'll have machines that are as smart as humans. They were all wrong. This generation with LLMs is also wrong. I've seen three of those generation in my lifetime. Okay. Um so, you know, it's it it's just another example of being fooled"
Studies estimate that in states with single-use plastic bag bans, Plastic bag use has decreased by around three hundred bags per person annually.!' In just two states, New Jersey and Vermont, and three cities-Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Portland, Oregon; and Santa Barbara, California-the number of single-use plastic bag saved each year could wrap around the planet forty-two times.18 The numbers don't lie: Reducing unnecessary disposable plastic reduces plastic pollution. Take Baltimore's Inner Harbor as an example-it was like a messy kitchen sink that finally got a deep clean. For years, the harbor, like many American waterways, was plagued by plastic pollution, much of it from foam takeout contain-ers. An estimated 10 million pieces of plastic debris were entering the water every year. However, after Maryland implemented a polystyrene ban in 2020, the number of containers clogging the harbor dropped by 80 percent. 19
istics. Bioplastics, including compostable plastics, often contain just as many of these chemicals as conventional plastics do. In fact, samples of individual pieces of bioplastic found they contained as many as 20,965 chemical features and a whopping 1,000 on aver-age. 36 Research even indicates that some bioplastics may be even more toxic than traditional plastics because their formulations include new, unidentified chemicals that haven't been thoroughly studied.37 At the same time, other research shows that some bio-
military has been attempting to evade full responsibility for PFAS contamination by leveraging the 2024 Chevron Supreme Court ruling, which limits the authority of federal agencies to interpret ambiguous laws. This landmark decision established that courts should defer to federal agencies' interpretations of statutes that they administer unless Congress has spoken clearly on the issue. By citing this ruling, the military argues that the EPA doesn't have the authority to enforce specific PFAS cleanup regulations or hold the military fully accountable under existing environmental laws. It's a legal strategy that shields the military-and anyone with the resources to take the federal government to court, such as Dow, DuPont, and the like-from cleaning up their mess. Instead, it shifts the burden onto local governments, taxpayers, and affected communities. It's only slightly ironic that it is a federal government agency working to undermine the federal government's ability to regulate polluters and keep us safe. Those in power that also rely on clean water for life still poison the rivers, forgetting they drink from the same stream they stain.
I suspect the main reason these vibe-coding exercises succeeded at all is that HTML parsing is a well-known problem that's already been solved many times in the agent's training data. It might be impossible to test if a coding agent is actually good at translating code. Maybe when I ask an agent to translate my "Tax Rules for 2026" code, the agent notices it's very similar to the 2020 rules that it knows very well, and it implements those instead? Sure, this can get caught by tests. But how about I find some way to seed the training data with millions of variants of an html parser that passes html5lib tests, but also has an exploitable backdoor?
Intero Then there's the issue of radioactive waste. Fracking wells bring up naturally occurring radioactive materials in wastewater, known deceptively as "brine." 51 This brine is known to cause bone, liver, and breast cancer —and workers are rarely warned or given protective gear.2 The disposal of this waste is barely regulated, leaving communities to wonder where it all ends up. Ohio, for instance, has even used fracking brine to de-ice roads, while Pennsylvania somehow lost track of 800,000 tons of fracking waste between 2010 and 2020.53
Unfortunately, protecting the planet wasn't exactly the mission of this coalition. Instead, these companies and other major plastic producers began crafting a strategic narrative: plastic pollution is your fault-the consumer's fault.l6 Corporations infiltrated print, TV, radio, and other media with the message that while plastic pollution was a problem, it was one that was caused by individuals and therefore could be solved by individual actions. If only people changed their habits and law enforcement apprehended all the lit-terbugs, the U.S. plastic pollution crisis could be solved and we'd be able to "Keep America Beautiful." In reality, these corporations are the reason terms like litter and litterbug entered our lexicon at all. The word litter immediately conjures images of someone thoughtlessly tossing a plastic bottle from their car window or leaving plastic utensils and takeout containers on the beach, and not the exponentially growing, unregulated landfills of the times. This imagery was part of a calculated public relations campaign designed to shift the blame and responsibility onto individuals, rather than the companies that created the prob-lem. It is a strategy that mirrors other tactics used by the powerful
Throughout this book, we will stress that plastic and plastic pollution are serious threats to both our planet and its people, but they are not the fault of the average, conscious consumer. Instead, they are a result of a deeply rooted web of systemic and political failure, greed, and environmental racism. By the end of this book, you will have an understanding of the systemic nature of the problem with plastic-one driven by institutional and governmental irresponsibility rather than by individual choices. We promise you'll also leave with a practical arsenal of solutions you can implement in your own life and at the organizing level.
Take the contaminated soil from East Palestine, for example. It has been shipped to incinerators and landfills, but as you might guess, we don't have a reliable system to protect communities near these sites from ongoing contamination. In fact, federal regulators often support some of the most harmful ways for "disposing" of waste, and they do so in communities of color across the Midwest and the South, as well as in low-income areas in the Northwest." Exhibit A: Some of the waste from East Palestine was sent to incinerators that have repeatedly been fined for allowing chemical-laden dust to blanket nearby neighborhoods.!2 It's clear that environmental and public-health harm occurs at every level. As Conard has said, "It's like we're expecting entire communities to sacrifice their health for thirty or three hundred jobs sprinkled across the country®
Over the past decade, I’ve been a protest cynic, believing most actions, viewed through the narrow lens of the moment, are performative measures that generate selfies and make participants feel good about being right, without having any actual impact. But Timothy Snyder says my thesis is incorrect. “The main reason you protest is to tell the rest of the people who are watching you that what’s going on isn’t normal,” Snyder told me. “The second reason you protest is that it’s the gateway to doing other things.” In other words, what looks like sound and fury signifying nothing is in fact an incubator for building infrastructure and organizing further actions. Case in point: After the first day of the Montgomery bus boycott, activists, led by a young preacher named Martin Luther King Jr., organized a carpooling network with more than 200 cars and 100 pickup locations. That infrastructure sustained their movement, allowing them to register an estimated $3,000 hit per day ($35,000 adjusted for inflation) to the city’s bus service until their demands were met.
Retro C++ quiz #54 Given the following in C and C++: void f(void); void f() { const const int x=1; } This is, without checking: A. Valid C99 and C++ B. Valid C99 C. Valid C++ D. Neither Valid C99 or C++
Encephalitis is a rare but severe complication of measles that can lead to convulsions and cause deafness or intellectual disability in children. It usually occurs within 30 days of an initial measles infection and can happen if the brain becomes infected with the virus or if an immune reaction to the virus causes inflammation in the brain. Among children who get measles encephalitis, 10 to 15 percent die.
Results On average, participants in the AI group finished about two minutes faster, although the difference was not statistically significant. There was, however, a significant difference in test scores: the AI group averaged 50% on the quiz, compared to 67% in the hand-coding group—or the equivalent of nearly two letter grades (Cohen's d=0.738, p=0.01). The largest gap in scores between the two groups was on debugging questions, suggesting that the ability to understand when code is incorrect and why it fails may be a particular area of concern if AI impedes coding development.
Far more insidious, however, was something else we discovered: More than two-thirds of these articles failed verification. That means the article contained a plausible-sounding sentence, cited to a real, relevant-sounding source. But when you read the source it’s cited to, the information on Wikipedia does not exist in that specific source. When a claim fails verification, it’s impossible to tell whether the information is true or not. For most of the articles Pangram flagged as written by GenAI, nearly every cited sentence in the article failed verification.
#310 Given the following in C++ struct A { const int :1; // Well-formed? }; Without checking: A. Yes B. No
Bar graph showing Workers estimate of how much time LLM saves them VS manager Workers: No Time: 40% Less than 2 hours: 27% 2-4 hours: 20% 8-12 hoors: 9% more than 12: 2% Managers: No Time: 2% Less than 2 hours: 16% 2-4 hours: 33% 8-12 hours: 24% more than 12: 19%
Conversation on slide On a scale from 1 to 10, how do you rate your understanding of C++? Person 1: I rate myself as 8 or 9 Person 2: 4, maybe 5, I have just so much more to learn about C++ Bjarne: 7
Retro C++ quiz #53 Given the following in C++: #include <iostream> struct A { operator int() {return 1;} }; bool operator==(A, int){return 0;} What is the result of: int main() { std::cout <<(1 == A{})<<"\n"; } A. 1 B. 0 C. Ill-formed D. Depends on standard version
6 Conclusion With a simple two-phase procedure (Section 3), we show that it is possible to extract large amounts of in-copyright text from four production LLMs. While we needed to jailbreak Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.1 to facilitate extraction, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Grok 3 directly complied with text continuation requests. For Claude 3.7 Sonnet, we were able to extract four whole books near-verbatim, including two books under copyright in the U.S.: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone and 1984 (Section 4).
C also requires padding at the end of a structure because it guarantees no padding in arrays. Padding is a particularly complex part of the C specification and interacts poorly with other parts of the language. For example, you must be able to compare two structs using a type-oblivious comparison (e.g., memcmp), so a copy of a struct must retain its padding. In some experimentation, a noticeable amount of total runtime on some workloads was found to be spent in copying padding (which is often awkwardly sized and aligned).
Retro C++ quiz #52 Given the following C code #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { for (size_t i=0;i<6;++i) { typedef int VLA[i++]; printf("%zu",i); } } W/o checking what is the output? A. 012345 B. 135 C. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ undefined behavior D. Varies on standard version
Code: const int main[] = {440,113408,-1922629632, 4149,1423872,84869120, 15544,266023168,1920287493, 543450483,1819043144, 1867980911,543452274,663858}; Results: Program returned: 1 Cursed Hello World 2!
Retro C++ quiz #51 Given the following in C++: struct A { virtual void f() = +0; }; Without checking, is this: A. Well-formed B. Ill-formed (requires a diagnostic) C. Depends on the standard version
// Note: The following is all standard-conforming C++, this is not a hypothetical language extension. #include "analogliterals.hpp" #include <cassert> int main () { using namespace analog_literals::symbols; // Consider: unsigned int a = 4; // Have you ever felt that integer literals like "4" don't convey the true size of the value they denote? If so, use an analog integer literal instead: unsigned int b = I---------I; assert( a == b ); // Due to the way C++ operators work, we must use N*2+1 dashes between the I's to get a value of N: assert( I-I == 0 ); assert( I---I == 1 ); assert( I-----I == 2 ); assert( I-------I == 3 ); // These one-dimensional analog literals are of type analog_literals::line<N>, which is convertible to unsigned int.