Best of C Programming — September 2025

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    Article
    Avatar of hnHacker News·36w

    vicinaehq/vicinae: A focused launcher for your desktop — native, fast, extensible

    Vicinae is a high-performance desktop launcher built with C++ and Qt, designed as an alternative to Raycast. It offers keyboard-first access to system actions, file search across millions of files, clipboard history, calculator, emoji picker, and extensibility through React/TypeScript extensions. The launcher includes Raycast compatibility for reusing existing extensions and targets developers and power users seeking fast, native performance without Electron overhead.

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    Article
    Avatar of devtoDEV·36w

    In Defense of C++

    C++ remains a powerful and relevant programming language despite common criticisms about complexity, safety, and being outdated. The language's perceived complexity can be managed by starting simple and adding advanced features only when needed. Modern C++ standards (C++20, C++23) continue to evolve with new features like modules and coroutines. While memory safety concerns are valid, they can be addressed through smart pointers and proper practices. C++ continues to power major systems from browsers to game engines, and rewrites to other languages often succeed due to architectural improvements rather than just language choice.

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    Article
    Avatar of hnHacker News·36w

    qgis/QGIS: QGIS is a free, open source, cross platform (lin/win/mac) geographical information system (GIS)

    QGIS is a free, open-source geographical information system that runs on multiple platforms. It offers comprehensive spatial data management for raster, vector, mesh, and point cloud formats, advanced cartography with 2D/3D rendering, robust geospatial analysis with 200+ native algorithms, extensive customization through plugins and APIs, and includes QGIS Server for web mapping services. The project is actively maintained by a developer community and follows a time-based release cycle with Long Term Release and Latest Release branches.

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    Video
    Avatar of lauriewiredLaurieWired·37w

    This C code should be ILLEGAL. It's also fantastic.

    A reverse engineer analyzes obfuscated C code submissions from the International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) using Ghidra decompiler. The analysis reveals surprising implementations including a Rick Roll animation, a complete Doom game running in a virtual machine, a 3D renderer, an LLM chatbot with multiple personalities, a Vim clone, and other creative programs. The experiment demonstrates both the effectiveness of reverse engineering tools and the ingenuity of obfuscated code techniques.

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    Article
    Avatar of lobstersLobsters·34w

    Linus Torvalds and the Supposedly “Garbage Code”

    A detailed analysis of Linus Torvalds' criticism of a RISC-V kernel contribution, examining the technical merits of helper functions versus explicit bit manipulation code. The author argues that proper helper functions with type casting and bit masking are safer and more maintainable than inline expressions, demonstrating correct implementations in both C macros and C++ constexpr functions.

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    Video
    Avatar of lowlevellearningLow Level Learning·36w

    literally the dumbest thing I've ever read

    A security researcher submitted a fake vulnerability report claiming to have found a critical buffer overflow in curl's cookie parsing mechanism. The report was generated using AI and contained a proof-of-concept that didn't actually call any curl functions, instead triggering a basic C string overflow in their own test code. Daniel Stenberg, curl's maintainer, quickly identified the report as AI-generated nonsense and closed it as invalid. This incident highlights the growing problem of AI-generated spam in bug bounty programs, wasting maintainers' time with false vulnerability reports.

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