this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2025
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I don't think that casting a range of bits as some other arbitrary type "is a bug nobody sees coming".

C++ compilers also warn you that this is likely an issue and will fail to compile if configured to do so. But it will let you do it if you really want to.

That's why I love C++

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[–] deegeese@sopuli.xyz 124 points 4 days ago (1 children)

C lets you shoot yourself in the foot.

C++ lets you reuse the bullet.

[–] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 38 points 4 days ago

C is dangerous like your uncle who drinks and smokes. Y’wanna make a weedwhacker-powered skateboard? Bitchin’! Nail that fucker on there good, she’ll be right. Get a bunch of C folks together and they’ll avoid all the stupid easy ways to kill somebody, in service to building something properly dangerous. They’ll raise the stakes from “accident” to “disaster.” Whether or not it works, it’s gonna blow people away.

C++ is dangerous like a quiet librarian who knows exactly which forbidden tomes you’re looking for. He and his… associates… will gladly share all the dark magic you know how to ask about. They’ll assure you that the power cosmic would never, without sufficient warning, pull someone inside-out. They don’t question why a loving god would allow the powers you crave. They will show you which runes to carve, and then, they will hand you the knife.

[–] Contramuffin@lemmy.world 90 points 4 days ago (2 children)

What do you mean I'm not supposed to add 0x5f3759df to a float casted as a long, bitshifted right by 1?

[–] panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 85 points 4 days ago (31 children)

I actually do like that C/C++ let you do this stuff.

Sometimes it's nice to acknowledge that I'm writing software for a computer and it's all just bytes. Sometimes I don't really want to wrestle with the ivory tower of abstract type theory mixed with vague compiler errors, I just want to allocate a block of memory and apply a minimal set rules on top.

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[–] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 56 points 4 days ago

C++: all the footguns you need plus a lot more that you never imagined in a single language

[–] magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 54 points 4 days ago (5 children)

There are no medals waiting for you by writing overly clever code. Trust me, I’ve tried. There’s no pride. Only pain.

[–] Chrobin@discuss.tchncs.de 25 points 4 days ago (3 children)

It really depends on your field. I'm doing my master's thesis in HPC, and there, clever programming is really worth it.

[–] magic_lobster_party@fedia.io 13 points 4 days ago

Well as long you know what you’re doing and weigh the risks with the benefits you’re probably ok.

In my experience in the industry, there’s little benefit in pretending you’re John Carmack writing fast inverse square root. Understanding what you wrote 6 months ago outweighs most else.

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[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 8 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Not only that, but everyone who sees that code later is going to waste so much time trying to understand it. That includes future you.

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[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 42 points 3 days ago (11 children)

"C++ compilers also warn you..."

Ok, quick question here for people who work in C++ with other people (not personal projects). How many warnings does the code produce when it's compiled?

I've written a little bit of C++ decades ago, and since then I've worked alongside devs who worked on C++ projects. I've never seen a codebase that didn't produce hundreds if not thousands of lines of warnings when compiling.

[–] Zacryon@feddit.org 25 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I mostly see warnings when compiling source code of other projects. If you get a warning as a dev, it's your responsibility to deal with it. But also your risk, if you don't. I made it a habit to fix every warning in my own projects. For prototyping I might ignore them temporarily. Some types of warnings are unavoidable sometimes.

If you want to make yourself not ignore warnings, you can compile with -Werror if using GCC/G++ to make the compiler a pedantic asshole that doesn't compile until you fix every fucking warning. Not advisable for drafting code, but definitely if you want to ship it.

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[–] Jankatarch@lemmy.world 19 points 3 days ago

I put -Werror at the end of my makefile cflags so it actually treats warnings as errors now.

[–] jkercher@programming.dev 18 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You shouldn't have any warnings. They can be totally benign, but when you get used to seeing warnings, you will not see the one that does matter.

[–] merc@sh.itjust.works 6 points 3 days ago

I know, that's why it bothered me that it seemed to be "policy" to just ignore them.

[–] nroth@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago

0 in our case, but we are pretty strict. Same at the first place I worked too. Big tech companies.

[–] dejected_warp_core@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Ideally? Zero. I'm sure some teams require "warnings as errors" as a compiler setting for all work to pass muster.

In reality, there's going to be odd corner-cases where some non-type-safe stuff is needed, which will make your compiler unhappy. I've seen this a bunch in 3rd party library headers, sadly. So it ultimately doesn't matter how good my code is.

There's also a shedload of legacy things going on a lot of the time, like having to just let all warnings through because of the handful of places that will never be warning free. IMO its a way better practice to turn a warning off for a specific line.. Sad thing is, it's newer than C++ itself and is implementation dependent, so it probably doesn't get used as much.

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[–] Croquette@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

A production code should never have any warning left. This is a simple rule that will save a lot of headaches.

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[–] Ajen@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago

My team uses the -Werror flag, so our code won't compile if there are any warnings at all.

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[–] pennomi@lemmy.world 35 points 4 days ago (1 children)

C++ is kinky that way. You can consent to all manner of depraved programming patterns. Great for use in personal life, but maybe not appropriate for the office.

[–] Korne127@lemmy.world 51 points 4 days ago (3 children)
[–] qaz@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

https://github.com/Shadlock0133/cargo-vibe

I thought it was a joke, but this is actually viable and even configurable

By default, cargo-vibe will, on success, vibe full strength for 3 seconds.

You can change that by setting CARGO_VIBE_PATTERN environment variable. For example, to set it vibe for 1.5 second on 20% strength, you can do:

CARGO_VIBE_PATTERN="0.2 1.5s" cargo vibe <cmd>

You can also set full patterns of vibes to run, by separating them with slashes /. Here is one example:

CARGO_VIBE_PATTERN="0.4 1s/0.6 1s/0.8 0.75s/1.0 0.25s"

Wait, there's more! https://github.com/funkeleinhorn/cargo-shock

To let Cargo Shock trigger your shock collar use: cargo shock build

To use it everytime you can alias cargo="cargo shock".

Cargo Shock can also be combined with other tools like Cargo Mommy and Cargo Vibe like this: cargo mommy vibe shock build ...

And they have a really slick site: https://openshock.org/

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[–] wer2@lemmy.zip 30 points 4 days ago (1 children)

My issue is C++ will "let me do it", and by that I mean "you didn't cast here (which is UB), so I will optimize out a null check later, and then segfault in a random location"

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[–] UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world 25 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (3 children)

I used to love C++ until I learned Rust. Now I think it is obnoxious, because even if you write modern C++, without raw pointers, casting and the like, you will be constantly questioning whether you do stuff right. The spec is just way too complicated at this point and it can only get worse, unless they choose to break backwards compatibility and throw out the pre C++11 bullshit

[–] mobotsar@sh.itjust.works 15 points 4 days ago* (last edited 18 hours ago)

Depending on what I'm doing, sometimes rust will annoy me just as much. Often I'm doing something I know is definitely right, but I have to go through so much ceremony to get it to work in rust. The most commonly annoying example I can think of is trying to mutably borrow two distinct fields of a struct at the same time. You can't do it. It's the worst.

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[–] BigDanishGuy@sh.itjust.works 24 points 4 days ago (10 children)

But it will let you do it if you really want to.

Now, I've seen this a couple of times in this post. The idea that the compiler will let you do anything is so bizarre to me. It's not a matter of being allowed by the software to do anything. The software will do what you goddamn tell it to do, or it gets replaced.

WE'RE the humans, we're not asking some silicon diodes for permission. What the actual fuck?!? We created the fucking thing to do our bidding, and now we're all oh pwueez mr computer sir, may I have another ADC EAX, R13? FUCK THAT! Either the computer performs like the tool it is, or it goes the way of broken hammers and lawnmowers!

[–] BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 16 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Ok gramps now take your meds and off you go to the retirement home

collapsed inline media

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[–] AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Soldiers are supposed to question potentially-illegal orders and refuse to execute them if their commanding officer can't give a good reason why they're justified. Being in charge doesn't mean you're infallible, and there are plenty of mistakes programmers make that the compiler can detect.

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[–] daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com 10 points 4 days ago

I will botton for my rust compiler, I'm not going to argue with it.

[–] WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 9 points 4 days ago

when life gives you restrictive compilers, don't request permission from them! make life take the compilers back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn restrictive compilers, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give BigDanishGuy restrictive compilers! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the compilers! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible compiler that burns your house down!

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[–] Gobbel2000@programming.dev 21 points 4 days ago

I'm all for having the ability to do these shenanigans in principle, but prefer if they are guarded in an unsafe block.

[–] Treczoks@lemmy.world 19 points 4 days ago (7 children)

Structs with union members that allow the same place in memory to be accessed either word-wise, byte-wise, or even bit-wise are a god-sent for everyone who needs to access IO-spaces, and I'm happy my C-compiler lets me do it.

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[–] who@feddit.org 18 points 4 days ago

Thank you for including the text as text.

[–] psycho_driver@lemmy.world 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I don't know which is worse. Using C++ like lazy C, or using C++ like it was designed to be used.

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[–] LovableSidekick@lemmy.world 11 points 3 days ago

As it should be. Airbags should go off when you crash, not when you drive near the edge of a cliff.

[–] dragonlobster@programming.dev 7 points 4 days ago

No need to cast as any types at all just work with bits directly /s

[–] LillyPip@lemmy.ca 7 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Why use a strongly typed language at all, then?

Sounds unnecessarily restrictive, right? Just cast whatever as whatever and let future devs sort it out.

$myConstant = ‘15’;
$myOtherConstant = getDateTime();
$buggyShit = $myConstant + $myOtherConstant;

Fuck everyone who comes after me for the next 20 years.

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