[HN Gopher] The case of the vector with an impossibly large size
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The case of the vector with an impossibly large size
Author : signa11
Score : 66 points
Date : 2024-01-12 05:27 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (devblogs.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (devblogs.microsoft.com)
| mgaunard wrote:
| It's interesting that people have such trivial problems with
| their C++ code and still manage to get an expert from Microsoft
| to look at it for them.
|
| Also what I find interesting is that modern tools like sanitizers
| would quickly say what's going on without needing any human
| analysis.
| jdthedisciple wrote:
| It's Raymond Chen.
|
| It's not that the customer deserves Raymond Chen. Not even HN
| deserves Raymond Chen.
|
| It's just that Raymond Chen is once again gracing us with his
| vast and deep insights.
|
| Legend.
| trashburger wrote:
| The fix is kind of weird, no? If the lazy initialization of the
| widgets fail, won't it stay stuck as failed forever (i.e. until
| the containing class is destroyed)? Is this intended behavior?
| tallanvor wrote:
| No, at least not if exceptions are propagated properly. The
| flag that determines if call_once should actually run or not
| doesn't get flipped if there's an exception.
| vsnf wrote:
| A favorite past-time of HN when a post with an interesting title
| on the microsoft.com domain appears, is to guess whether it's
| Raymond Chen, and then to fawn over Raymond Chen. All very well
| deserved, but are there any examples of interesting posts on
| microsoft.com from someone who isn't Raymond Chen discussed here?
| doesnt_know wrote:
| It's a pretty easy guess at this point since there isn't much
| else of value published on that domain.
| mapreduce wrote:
| The MSDN documents on the website have been invaluable to me.
| I mean I started by writing chat tools on Windows and their
| API docs have been excellent in getting me started. I mean
| stuff like https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/windows/win32/api/winuser/... I cannot understand why you
| think such a large website with so much documentation is of
| no value!
| cylemons wrote:
| Value in the context of Hacker News means something that is
| amusing, insightful, or impressive. It is very rare for
| plain ol' documentation to make it to the front page.
| taspeotis wrote:
| Eric Lippert used to publish some good stuff, and Michael
| Kaplan.
|
| Occasionally there is decent technical content from the SQL
| Server team [1].
|
| [1]
| https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2022/07/21/improv...
| lifthrasiir wrote:
| Note that Michael Kaplan's original blog ceased to exist
| after he died and MS "renewed" MSDN blogs, but the archive is
| still available [1].
|
| [1] https://archives.miloush.net/michkap/archive/
| jcrites wrote:
| Eric is no longer with Microsoft, by the way. He was
| previously on the C# compiler team. I believe he was at
| JetBrains when I last looked him up. Looks like his blog
| "Fabulous Adventures in Coding" is on his website now:
|
| https://ericlippert.com/
|
| (I worked with him briefly in, I think it was, 2005.)
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Was Scott Hanselman ever officially on microsoft.com?
| tialaramex wrote:
| Microsoft ships a moderately interesting modern language C# and
| so there are posts which attract a small amount of comment
| about new C# versions and their features, e.g 12 comments about
| C# 8.0
|
| And likewise they ship new hardware sometimes, a new Surface
| Pro got hundreds of comments.
|
| A big problem for these posts and for The Old New Thing
| (Raymond Chen's blog) is that Microsoft doesn't understand URL
| stability and so old material is too often moved, misfiled, or
| just destroyed altogether for no good reason. In particular it
| seems as though the web site (more vital now than ever for the
| company's appearance to the rest of the world) is routinely
| offered as a fun toy for a new executive to make their mark on
| to show how they've got exciting new visions for the company.
| Maybe this week Microsoft decided they loved blogs, everything
| is a blog now, want to announce Microsoft Boring Product 8.6.4?
| Write a blog post, and your customers can respond to the blog
| post, because we're an exciting modern tech compan... no, we
| abandoned that idea, all blogs are to be removed and the
| customer posts go with thme. Yes that means you've written what
| is now an article "responding" to customer questions which no
| longer exist but too bad we don't have time to fix that because
| _now_ Microsoft is a video-first company, they are dynamic and
| hot, here are six hour long videos about Microsoft Boring
| Product and we are going to be delivering a new video _every
| single week_ uh, wait, that 's expensive, OK, no sorry there
| are no further videos about Boring Product, it's now a Wiki!
| Yes, experts even from outside Microsoft can contribute
| valuable material about Boring Product, we're going to
| transition all our boring stale material into user editable
| dyna... Nope! New plan, we're locking every wiki article and
| we're removing the unofficial content, yes, customers were
| relying on BigBabo4239's sixty paragraph explanation of how to
| use Power Shell with Boring Product but that no longer aligns
| with our corporate strategy so we've deleted it...
| logifail wrote:
| > the web site [..] is routinely offered as a fun toy for a
| new executive to make their mark on to show how they've got
| exciting new visions for the company
|
| To be fair to Microsoft, this issue affects a great many
| other companies, even outside the technology space.
|
| My personal favourite has got to be www.britishairways.com,
| where you can discover older and older versions of their
| website layered like the concentric rings of some ancient
| tree.
|
| https://www.britishairways.com/travel/home/public/en_gb/
|
| https://www.britishairways.com/travel/webforms/public/en_gb?.
| ..
|
| and even the gloriously broken
|
| https://www.britishairways.com/onbusiness/how.shtml
| OsrsNeedsf2P wrote:
| While the British Airways link is amusing, it's much less
| amusing when you've been linked to a now moved
| documentation page, or worse, a now deleted download page.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > older and older versions of their website layered like
| the concentric rings
|
| I like this approach. Keep old content forever, just mark
| it as "old" at the top of each page and archive it as a
| static html page at its original URL.
| londons_explore wrote:
| (archiving as static html needs to be done at some point,
| otherwise you'll still be running php4...)
| hexane360 wrote:
| See also Windows setting menus. People see this as a flaw,
| but I much prefer that to breaking existing functionality
| for the sake of a redesign. Make a new interface for simple
| usecases, but keep the old one around just in case.
| jsight wrote:
| I feel like this is the norm at big companies. Oh, noone is
| using platform abc any more, it is too basic. We must switch
| to def! And we can't afford the retain old links feature, who
| needs that anyway.
|
| I've seen platforms where if no content author was around to
| vouch for old technical documents, they'd get summarily
| deleted. Saves storage! _sigh_
| hardware2win wrote:
| Stephen Toub
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/how-async-await-really...
| ReleaseCandidat wrote:
| Yes, papers or articles from MS research, e.g. from Simon
| Peyton-Jones or about Koka or Lean.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36471591 ... Guess
| something about VS or VS code too.
| allenrb wrote:
| Busted. Saw this and immediately thought it had to be a Raymond
| Chen post. Whatever he's getting paid, it probably isn't
| enough.
| physicsguy wrote:
| I've been out of C++ for a couple of years now, but
| std::call_once is totally new to me, despite being in C++11.
|
| It really is a language where if you got 5 different people to
| write a solution to something you'd get 5 wildly different
| answers.
| tialaramex wrote:
| Six, at least. Also at least one of the answers the five people
| swear they use will turn out to be either Undefined Behaviour
| or a quirk of one particular compiler/ toolchain.
|
| Like sure, volatile integers _are_ basically just atomic
| variables with easier syntax... _if_ you are on x86-64 and
| using MSVC. Otherwise no they really aren 't.
| mihaaly wrote:
| A nice, related meme:
|
| https://mikelui.io/img/c++_init_forest.gif
| tialaramex wrote:
| And on that subject https://leanpub.com/cppinitbook - a
| _book_ just about initialization in C++ which is in some
| sense (more pages) longer than my edition of K &R ("The C
| Programming Language").
|
| Despite all this complexity, C++ 23 has problems with
| mistakenly uninitialized variables _and_ still lacks a
| coherent strategy to do deferred initialization correctly.
| classified wrote:
| That GIF should mention the relevant C++ standard, because
| next year there will be at least one more additional way to
| initialize.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I consider that a feature tho.
| tiagod wrote:
| After working on golang projects for a while, I really like
| having one obvious way to do things.
| davikr wrote:
| Is it habitual for Microsoft to help their customers like this?
| Is there some kind of support or consultancy contract for it?
| tallanvor wrote:
| Microsoft has probably the largest support organization of any
| software company. A lot of it is outsourced support that mostly
| runs through support trees, but enterprises can and do pay for
| support from actual employees who can actually debug issues and
| involve developers when needed.
| gnarlouse wrote:
| I missed it. How big was the vector
| abound wrote:
| > The m_widgets is expected to have only four widgets, but it
| somehow found itself with ten, and sometimes as many as a
| hundred widgets.
| mike_hock wrote:
| Asking that question is UB.
| WesSouza wrote:
| It's never lupus. It's always race conditions.
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(page generated 2024-01-12 23:02 UTC)