The Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition

https://tgceec.tumblr.com/post/74534916370/results-of-the-grand-c-error-explosion/

by rahimiali • 7 years ago

106 32 7 years ago

tgceec.tumblr.com

watt• 7 years ago

(2014)

Fascinating stuff!

rwmj2• 7 years ago

I really hope the first thing Automattic do when they acquire Tumblr is to kill that ridiculous OAuth splash screen.

dgellow• 7 years ago

Just a detail: it is Oath (the company, https://www.oath.com), not OAuth (the open standard, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAuth).

Sharlin• 7 years ago

They're probably the current champions in how to make opting out of tracking cookies maximally inconvenient. Although to their credit they at least seem to remember my choices instead of sneakily reverting back to "accept everything" after a while.

froh42• 7 years ago

So if it annoys you, why do you still surf their site? I shift my attenton to sites which treat me fairly (and so I do with them. tit for tat).

rwmj2• 7 years ago

I don't - and it seems millions more people have turned away too, given the precipitous drop in their audience and valuation. It was just in this case I didn't notice the link was to tumblr before I clicked on it.

kipqi• 7 years ago

How else would I read this particular post?

Also it's not like Tumblr was like this when this post was, er, posted. It was pretty nice to browse.

ec1096852• 7 years ago

It’s for GDPR compliance.

Someone• 7 years ago

They may claim that, but I don’t think it makes them GDPR-compliant. IMO, it’s in conflict with https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-32/:

”If the data subject’s consent is to be given following a request by electronic means, the request must be clear, concise and not unnecessarily disruptive to the use of the service for which it is provided.”

and https://gdpr-info.eu/issues/consent/:

”The withdrawal must be as easy as giving consent.”

rogual• 7 years ago

It's poorly implemented too -- even if you're requesting a blog's RSS feed, Tumblr sends you that Oath screen unless your user-agent is on their list of approved RSS readers.

jokoon• 7 years ago

Im in the EU and I NEVER accept those GDPR message things.

Luckily this time outline worked and allowed me to read the article.

shakna• 7 years ago

We also tested this with Clang, which detects correctly the missing semicolon, after which it anyway tries to evaluate the infinite template recursion and eventually segfaults

When you break the compiler with a list of errors, you've successfully hung the programmer out to dry.

martincmartin• 7 years ago

Extra credit for using Perl, which is the only language less readable than C++ templates.

Ballas• 7 years ago

I almost burst into laughter reading that!

ajross• 7 years ago

Sort of hilarious here, given the premise of the competition (that C++ has outrageously long error messages), that the winner is exploiting the preprocessor and not C++ at all.

kazinator• 7 years ago

Creative Computing magazine had a competition like this in the 1970's: provoke the most compiler diagnostics with the least code type of thing.

WesternStar• 7 years ago

I suppose the fact they stopped doing this 4 years ago says something good about current c++.

persistent2• 7 years ago

Color template errors are the greatest leap in the history of computer science. No longer do I need to scan megabytes of output to find the unexpected |unsigned| in the fifth level of a template expansion.

https://clang.llvm.org/diagnostics.html

notacoward• 7 years ago

Worth noting that the preprocessor made this so easy that they had to create a separate division, and templates made it easy for most of the rest. Future language designers, take note.

Ididntdothis3• 7 years ago

When I did more C++ i found it weirdly satisfying to get a few hundred or thousands of errors during build and then fixing all of them with only a few changes.

noncoml• 7 years ago

When I was in college people would come to me to help them with their C++ compilation errors. My secret? Most of them would start trying to fix the reported errors bottom up. I would start top down and be done with probably one missing semicolon or something simple as that.

Ididntdothis3• 7 years ago

Going top down seems to be the secret. I do mainly C# now but even there a lot of people get confused by looking at the last error on the screen. I always only look at the first error and deal with that before looking at anything else.

mikelward• 7 years ago

I wish tools defaulted to only showing the first error.

persistent2• 7 years ago

If you have thousands of errors it is likely you simply misplaced a comma or semicolon. If you have just one error you are in deep trouble.

DoofusOfDeath• 7 years ago

One of my main complaints about C++ metaprogramming is that its evaluation can be as complex as the runtime behavior of a normal program, but AFAIK no compiler provides metaprogram debugging tools. E.g., execution tracing or single-step debugging of metaprogram execution.

Anyone know of good tools of this nature for gcc and/or clang?

dymk• 7 years ago

Yes, Templite and Templar: https://baptiste-wicht.com/posts/2016/02/use-templight-and-t...

trollied• 7 years ago

If you like this sort of thing, you'll probably enjoy The International Obfuscated C Code Contest. https://www.ioccc.org

Winning entries: https://www.ioccc.org/years.html

I quite like self-generating progs, eg: https://www.ioccc.org/1990/scjones.c https://www.ioccc.org/2000/dhyang.c

jedisct1• 7 years ago

Rust Futures: hold my beer.

The Grand C++ Error Explosion Competition

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