Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > Coding Horrors: You can gather all your technical debt into one easy framework!

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Mustach: Mar 2, 2003; In this long line, there's been some real strange genes. You've got 'em all, with some extras thrown in.

Not having -Wall be the default is also a horror. Well, maybe "horror" is a little strong, so how about "questionable."

# ? Feb 8, 2010 02:18

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# ? May 15, 2024 06:36

TOO SCSI FOR MY CAT: Oct 12, 2008; this is what happens when you take UI design away from engineers and give it to a bunch of hipster art student "designers"

Where I work, none of the builds use -Wall because "it prints too much noise".

Then they go and do stupid poo poo like (guess what happens when input is "-10"):

code:

bool verifyParams(int foo, int bar) {
  if(foo < 2) { ... }
  if(bar < 2) { ... }
}

bool parseParams(string& input) {
  unsigned int foo, bar;
  stringstream in(input);
  in >> foo >> bar;
  return verifyParams(foo, bar);
}

# ? Feb 8, 2010 04:19

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

Janin posted:

Where I work, none of the builds use -Wall because "it prints too much noise".

Conversely I use the following because -Wall is too quiet,

-Wall -Wextra -Wfloat-equal -Wshadow -Wunsafe-loop-optimizations -Wpointer-arith -Wbad-function-cast -Wcast-qual -Wcast-align -Wwrite-strings -Waggregate-return -Wstrict-prototypes -Wold-style-definition -Wmissing-prototypes -Wmissing-declarations -Wmissing-noreturn -Wmissing-format-attribute -Wredundant-decls -Wnested-externs -Winline -pedantic

If you want really noisy output try the ICC compiler, warnings 981 "operands are evaluated in unspecified order" and 2259 "non-pointer conversion from "*" to "*" may lose significant bits" are crazy.

# ? Feb 8, 2010 04:38

fritz: Jul 26, 2003

insure++ warns (warned?) about not saving the return value from printf

# ? Feb 8, 2010 04:58

MrMoo: Sep 14, 2000

fritz posted:

insure++ warns (warned?) about not saving the return value from printf

That's where you end up with all the lazy developers doing inane hacks like void casting returns:

code:

(void)printf ("moo moo moo");

I've also seen many build scripts redirect warnings to /dev/null :haw:

# ? Feb 8, 2010 05:23

BigRedDot: Mar 6, 2008

Janin posted:

Where I work, none of the builds use -Wall because "it prints too much noise".

This is true for most of our code as well. By the way we write software for submarines.

# ? Feb 8, 2010 15:00

Avenging Dentist: Oct 1, 2005; oh my god is that a circular saw that does not go in my mouth aaaaagh

BigRedDot posted:

This is true for most of our code as well. By the way we write software for submarines.

Get a Buildbot and a person who hates the color orange and gradually add -Whatever options to the Buildbot.

# ? Feb 8, 2010 15:01

Zombywuf: Mar 29, 2008

Avenging Dentist posted:

Get a Buildbot and a person who hates the color orange and gradually add -Whatever options to the Buildbot.

Or simply automate a process to collect the warnings, svn blame to get the developer from the file and line number and email them the relevant lines from the error log.

Bonus points for one email per line with a warning.

# ? Feb 8, 2010 15:48

BigRedDot: Mar 6, 2008

Avenging Dentist posted:

Get a Buildbot and a person who hates the color orange and gradually add -Whatever options to the Buildbot.

Would that I could. Our three-sided wheel, homespun, messy perl-script build system is a horror unto itself. Why yes, it is named after the person who wrote it.

Edit: zombywuf I want to hug you

# ? Feb 8, 2010 15:52

Avenging Dentist: Oct 1, 2005; oh my god is that a circular saw that does not go in my mouth aaaaagh

There is literally no reason you can't use Buildbot, since fundamentally, it just runs shell commands.

# ? Feb 8, 2010 15:57

Zombywuf: Mar 29, 2008

Avenging Dentist posted:

There is literally no reason you can't use Buildbot, since fundamentally, it just runs shell commands.

You'd be amazed how unmanageably complicated people can make build systems. There is a tendency to reduce the build process to a single command which either returns yes or no, and then unwind that whole process to get at error messages while keeping it exactly the same.

# ? Feb 8, 2010 16:18

TOO SCSI FOR MY CAT: Oct 12, 2008; this is what happens when you take UI design away from engineers and give it to a bunch of hipster art student "designers"

BigRedDot posted:

This is true for most of our code as well. By the way we write software for submarines.

High-five "terrible standards for important software" buddy! I always find it amusing that open-source developers have long arguments about whether to use -Werror or not, when companies with millions of dollars to lose are like "gently caress it, if it doesn't crash more than once an hour or so, ship!".

Zombywuf posted:

Or simply automate a process to collect the warnings, svn blame to get the developer from the file and line number and email them the relevant lines from the error log.

Hah, I wish we were using anything as sane as Subversion. Our VCS has no CLI; its only interface is graphical, written in Java Swing, and uses over 200 MiB RAM (from a 1 GiB VM) when idle.

The VM is another funny thing. Everything we do -- editors, builds, the final product -- runs on Linux. But IT wants to keep Windows on the computers. So every developer has installed Linux in a VM and usually just keeps it full-screen all day.

Zombywuf posted:

Bonus points for one email per line with a warning.

*does this*
*gets fired for crashing the email server*

# ? Feb 8, 2010 16:48

dancavallaro: Sep 10, 2006; My title sucks

Sooooo anyone ever use Xilinx ISE?

# ? Feb 8, 2010 17:05

Athas: Aug 6, 2007; fuck that joker

Janin posted:

Hah, I wish we were using anything as sane as Subversion. Our VCS has no CLI; its only interface is graphical, written in Java Swing, and uses over 200 MiB RAM (from a 1 GiB VM) when idle.

What is the name of this horror? It sounds unbelievable.

Stories like these make me glad to be in academia. Do people set up incredibly awful things? Sure, but they normally can't force you to do the same.

# ? Feb 8, 2010 17:07

Zombywuf: Mar 29, 2008

Janin posted:

Hah, I wish we were using anything as sane as Subversion. Our VCS has no CLI; its only interface is graphical, written in Java Swing, and uses over 200 MiB RAM (from a 1 GiB VM) when idle.

All Java programs do this.

# ? Feb 8, 2010 17:20

TOO SCSI FOR MY CAT: Oct 12, 2008; this is what happens when you take UI design away from engineers and give it to a bunch of hipster art student "designers"

Athas posted:

What is the name of this horror? It sounds unbelievable.

Stories like these make me glad to be in academia. Do people set up incredibly awful things? Sure, but they normally can't force you to do the same.

I don't want to name it 'cause it might show up in Google; not many companies use it, obviously. It's owned by IBM, isn't ClearCase, and has a Wikipedia page.

# ? Feb 8, 2010 17:30

Lexical Unit: Sep 16, 2003

Zombywuf posted:

Or simply automate a process to collect the warnings, svn blame to get the developer from the file and line number and email them the relevant lines from the error log.

Bonus points for one email per line with a warning.

I work with BigRedDot, and I have emailed people about warnings and bugs before. Never has an email I sent out about a bug or warning resulted in the bug or warning being fixed. And every time I've fixed a bug or warning in a library I didn't initially write, it's caused my boss to respond with, "you shouldn't be wasting your time with that. Don't compile with -Wall. If the warning isn't on by default then just ignore it."

My boss is the guy who created our build system.

Features of our build system:

Dependancies expressed as symlinks or directories (it doesn't distinguish).
Only one main() function allowed per directory.
Your current directory is your target executable and has the same name as your directory.
Each subdirectory (including symlinks) become an individual library named "lib" + directory name + ".a"
Directories containing a _ignore file are ignored.
Written in mishmash of perl/bash and pre-made Makefiles.
The only way to have different behavior is to create a _override file that is-a Makefile that gets concatenated to the end of the generated Makefile.

# ? Feb 8, 2010 17:31

Avenging Dentist: Oct 1, 2005; oh my god is that a circular saw that does not go in my mouth aaaaagh

Lexical Unit posted:

Features of our build system:

Could be worse. You could be using autotools.

# ? Feb 8, 2010 18:17

Parantumaton: Jan 29, 2009; The OnLy ThInG
i LoVe MoRe
ThAn ChUgGiNg SeMeN
iS gEtTiNg PaId To Be A
sOcIaL MeDiA sHiLl
FoR mIcRoSoFt
AnD nOkIa

Zombywuf posted:

All Java programs do this.

Swing apps do, ours start at 24 megs (that's a lot too, agreed) and never pass 300 megs. Then again, our Java apps don't plain suck as apparently a lot of others' do...

# ? Feb 8, 2010 18:42

BigRedDot: Mar 6, 2008

Avenging Dentist posted:

Could be worse. You could be using autotools.

I've used autotools, so I know just how much it sucks. I can state without hesitation that this home-grown abortion is worse. My own preference would be cmake, but if the choice was autotools or what we have now I would switch in a heartbeat. Just to give you an idea: in order to have a "local" configuration that gets built here in our limited environment, and a "production" configuration that gets built at the lead integrator's site in the full environment, every one of our entire huge trees, in every one of our many baselines, is duplicated in its entirety, so that basically a symlink can change. Make sure you only, only ever pull from prod to local! Never the other way! No, really, not joking.

BigRedDot fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Feb 8, 2010

# ? Feb 8, 2010 19:35

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

Parantumaton posted:

Swing apps do, ours start at 24 megs (that's a lot too, agreed) and never pass 300 megs. Then again, our Java apps don't plain suck as apparently a lot of others' do...

24 megs is nothing, 300 megs could be a problem on a low-end machine.

# ? Feb 9, 2010 07:52

Zombywuf: Mar 29, 2008

Wheany posted:

24 megs is nothing, 300 megs could be a problem on a low-end machine.

Depends if all the programs on your system think 24MB is nothing.

# ? Feb 9, 2010 13:31

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

Zombywuf posted:

Depends if all the programs on your system think 24MB is nothing.

Well, if every background process and service running on this machine would take 24MB, I would be at about 1,5 GB. It would not be pleasant, since this machine only has a gig of RAM.

Then again, computers with 2 GB RAM is not exactly rare these days.

# ? Feb 9, 2010 14:27

zootm: Aug 8, 2006; We used to be better friends.

Edit: Replied to Zombywuf without realising.

# ? Feb 9, 2010 14:28

markerstore: Dec 5, 2003; Canny!

Wheany posted:

Well, if every background process and service running on this machine would take 24MB, I would be at about 1,5 GB. It would not be pleasant, since this machine only has a gig of RAM.

Then again, computers with 2 GB RAM is not exactly rare these days.

If only there were some way to temporarily store the contents of RAM on your hard drive while they weren't being used!

# ? Feb 9, 2010 17:09

Pardot: Jul 25, 2001

markerstore posted:

If only there were some way to temporarily store the contents of RAM on your hard drive while they weren't being used!

But there is, and you know there is :colbert:

# ? Feb 9, 2010 17:13

POKEMAN SAM: Jul 8, 2004

Pardot posted:

But there is, and you know there is

Hey some of us don't have your crazy GIGABYTE drives installed. I'm working on a machine with 4GB RAM and only 640MB disk drive. :awesome:

# ? Feb 9, 2010 17:22

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

markerstore posted:

If only there were some way to temporarily store the contents of RAM on your hard drive while they weren't being used!

Like I said: "It would not be pleasant, since this machine only has a gig of RAM." And besides, I was the one arguing that 24MB is nothing.

# ? Feb 9, 2010 17:29

Zombywuf: Mar 29, 2008

markerstore posted:

If only there were some way to temporarily store the contents of RAM on your hard drive while they weren't being used!

I think there is a way of doing that, I believe the mechanism is called thrashing.

# ? Feb 9, 2010 17:38

Parantumaton: Jan 29, 2009; The OnLy ThInG
i LoVe MoRe
ThAn ChUgGiNg SeMeN
iS gEtTiNg PaId To Be A
sOcIaL MeDiA sHiLl
FoR mIcRoSoFt
AnD nOkIa

Wheany posted:

24 megs is nothing, 300 megs could be a problem on a low-end machine.

Our software supports millions of users per day and are generally run on clustered servers (mostly because clients demand it) so 300 megs is nothing to us.

# ? Feb 9, 2010 18:22

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

Parantumaton posted:

Our software supports millions of users per day and are generally run on clustered servers (mostly because clients demand it) so 300 megs is nothing to us.

I just took a look at a price watch site and listed their computers by price. The cheapest computers were nettops that had 1 GB of memory. There was one thin client that had 512MB, and a bunch of "media" computers that also had 1 GB.

Pretty much any "real" desktops these days come with 2GB, often 3 or 4 gigs.

I'd say memory usage on software designed for a desktop computer (or higher) is not that big of a worry these days. Memory leaks are of course a different matter.

e: (I'm not disagreeing with you.)

# ? Feb 9, 2010 20:37

Bozart: Oct 28, 2006; Give me the finger.

Probably already been seen, but at work I ran into:

true = 1; false = 2;

admittedly it was to be able to use matrix math, and the labels didn't mean anything. But in matlab they're keywords.

# ? Feb 10, 2010 07:46

Standish: May 21, 2001

The Coverity guys have seen more bad code than anyone

quote:

Upon seeing an error report saying the following loop body was dead code
code:
for (i=1; i<0;i++)
...dead code
""No, that's a false positive; a loop executes at least once."

quote:

a buffer overflow checker flagged a bunch of errors of the form
code:
unsigned p[4];
p[4]=42;
"No, ANSI lets you write 1 past the end of the array." (After heated argument, the programmer said, "We'll have to agree to disagree.")

quote:

the following in the X Window System:
code:
if (getuid()!=0 && geteuid ==0)
{
  ErrorF("only root");
  exit(1);
}
It allowed any local user to get root access and generated enormous press coverage, including a mention on Fox news

# ? Feb 10, 2010 10:34

ZorbaTHut: May 5, 2005; wake me when the world is saved

Bozart posted:

Probably already been seen, but at work I ran into:

true = 1; false = 2;

admittedly it was to be able to use matrix math, and the labels didn't mean anything. But in matlab they're keywords.

I was working with an annoying C library a while back that defined its own FALSE and TRUE constants. I wanted to use those names on my own, so I ended up with

code:

#ifndef TRUE
#define TRUE 1
#endif

Then I copy-pasted it for FALSE. Except I forgot to change the 1 to a 0.

That one took me a while to find, let me tell you.

# ? Feb 10, 2010 10:39

tef: May 30, 2004; -> some l-system crap ->

Bozart posted:

Probably already been seen, but at work I ran into:

true = 1; false = 2;

In visual basic, true = -1 and false = 0 :3:

# ? Feb 10, 2010 12:32

mr_jim: Oct 30, 2006; OUT OF THE DARK

tef posted:

In visual basic, true = -1 and false = 0

A lot of Forths are the same way.

# ? Feb 10, 2010 12:47

Zombywuf: Mar 29, 2008

tef posted:

In visual basic, true = -1 and false = 0

#define TRUE ~0

# ? Feb 10, 2010 13:52

BigRedDot: Mar 6, 2008

ZorbaTHut posted:

I was working with an annoying C library a while back that defined its own FALSE and TRUE constants. I wanted to use those names on my own, so I ended up with
code:
#ifndef TRUE
#define TRUE 1
#endif
Then I copy-pasted it for FALSE. Except I forgot to change the 1 to a 0.

That one took me a while to find, let me tell you.

LOL I am reminded of the old, but still humorous How to Write Unmaintainable Code

quote:

Another technique is to make TRUE and FALSE have the same value, though most would consider that out and out cheating. Using values 1 and 2 or -1 and 0 is a more subtle way to trip people up and still look respectable.

# ? Feb 10, 2010 14:46

Flobbster: Feb 17, 2005; "Cadet Kirk, after the way you cheated on the Kobayashi Maru test I oughta punch you in tha face!"

Honestly modern languages are pretty wasteful defining FALSE as 0 and TRUE as 1. The smallest addressable unit you have to work with is a byte, so you've got at least seven other bits just sitting there, empty and wasted. You could do the ol' FALSE = 0 and TRUE = ~0 trick, but then if your Boolean values aren't evenly distributed, your computer's memory runs the risk of being way too light or way too heavy, and that's not good for the hardware. Or for anybody.

So really the best way is to define FALSE=0xAAAAAAAA and TRUE=0x55555555 (adjusted to the natural word length of the processor, of course). Then FALSE = ~TRUE still holds, but more importantly your Boolean values are nicely balanced with an equal number of set and clear bits.

It's the yin and the yang, man. Groovy.

# ? Feb 10, 2010 16:34

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# ? May 15, 2024 06:36

TOO SCSI FOR MY CAT: Oct 12, 2008; this is what happens when you take UI design away from engineers and give it to a bunch of hipster art student "designers"

code:

fstream file_stream(file_path.c_str());
stringstream file_xml;
while (file_stream) {
  string line;
  getline(file_stream, line);
  file_xml << line << "\n";
}

stringstream rm_cmd;
rm_cmd << "rm -f " << file_path;
system(rm_cmd.str().c_str());

string xml = file_xml.str();

# ? Feb 10, 2010 19:23

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