For archival purposes: the title was "Is this voodoo magic or divine intellect?"

He has left us. It is now "Better Way to Build C"

If we consider that the universe is a computer simulation, then random numbers are in fact pseudo-random, the results of a deterministic process. Nothing in the Universe is truly random. Have you heard of stories of incredible coincidences that should statistically be less common than they appear in real life? This is because random numbers are usually not along the normal distribution. The distribution of random numbers can be changed via prayer and manifestation to concentrate around a specific value. Terry Davis understood this, which was his quote, "God controls random numbers". And it's true, out of chaos becomes order. So we can use chaos theory to communicate with God. Just like the ancient Chinese meditated on a question, they heated bones over a fire and cracked them, the cracks resembled Chinese characters that they would then read as the answer to that question. Or various shamanic techniques such as divination on beans, and flipping coins. Just like TV/radio is static (random) until a signal comes in and changes the image, so the presence of a thought or a question changes the random number distribution into a deterministic value. So Terry Davis created a divination computer program, that generated random numbers in response to a question, and used these random numbers as an index into a lookup table containing quotes from the Bible. The computer prompts the user to enter a question, that string is then hashed into a number which is then used as the seed for the RNG. Then a sequence of random numbers are generated, which are then mapped into a sequence of strings containing quotes from the Bible. The result is a cryptic message, from God allegedly. I've written a similar program in C++. The key is to make the lookup table for the results very large, for me it's 11,000 different strings that can be chosen from. This is to keep the modulo from looping on itself, and to give it a variety. And it actually works and produces consistent answers to my questions! It doesn't work all the time, but it works much more often than conventional statistics would assume. Perhaps every 1 out of 7 times it gives me a relevant answer to the question that I posed. To improve the results the lookup table should be as long as possible, and as varied as possible, encompassing a wide variety of answers to possible questions, such as personal development, studying, encouragement, relationships, discipline, health, and lifestyle questions.

Odin also goes for same approach but something like this existed for over a decade now. Check out tup build system.

many languages did it to some degree (most famous is Kotlin&Gradle). you don't want to invent a domain-specific language, when you can just write a library for an existing language.

And I love how Tsoding hated it when he tried zig.

Hardest nob you say?

What question?

@@henrikholst7490 it is a reference to the previous title of this video: is it too much voodoo magic or is it divine intellect?

@@talhaakram I remember the quote differently

Even beyond that, it'd be easier to create a generic platform file that had a struct with function pointers, and then a file for each platform that each included the platform layer and assigned the function pointers to that platform. This would make it a lot easier to: 1. develop at first because you'd only need to support your own platform, and thus don't need to constantly refactor code for other platforms 2. implement a new platform because it just needs a new platform file that basically does the same things as the other platform APIs do (which isn't clustered all around) 3. be sure that all cases are always covered

Just a note: I do not find it highly important to optimize making it easy to implement platforms because most times I solely support between 1 and 3 platforms (Windows/Linux/Mac). So if this structure pushes to make that easier at _enough_ opportunity cost, it's not entirely useful to me. @@Muskar2

@@Muskar2 structs with function pointers seem like an overkill. it may please some FP people, but why not just switch between platform-dependent steps in the main function, at runtime? the idea that you can first define an interface and then just implement it is a tempting one, but often leads to disasters. the approach where you have step1_win, step1_posix, step2_win, step2_posix functions and if-elses in main isn't a spectacular one, but you can eyeball it and it just works.

​@@Daniel_Zhu_a6f Sure it may be overkill if you're just making something small. But it's scalable, if you need it to be. Switching between platform-dependent steps in the main function at runtime tends to become verbose and hard to keep track of, in my experience. But I agree that inlining is preferred over abstraction levels, until they become necessary. I'm not sure what disasters you're referring to in this specific case though. Creating an interface boundary between the functions that will run on every platform versus the things that need to happen uniquely on individual platforms is logical, because it's a certainty that the distinction will be necessary. Making it as easy as possible to handle platform-specific bugs or implementations is something I think makes it a lot simpler to work with. But if you're making a 10k LOC library, then it probably wont be a noticeable benefit, sure.

I mean if you change first stage nob.c which in turn may change a config you have to skip checking if config.h exists and straight up regenerate it

They don’t _want_ to remove them, they’ve literally already removed them in C23

⁠@@thebatchicle3429 foken zoomers from the committee. Why they just can't get the simplest point that k&r times were times of non-highlighted syntax? I mean yeah, I'm not using that style for the obvious comfort reason, but why to exclude it..

That’s not a compiler extension; it’s an operating system thing. Linux and the BSDs accept a third argument but it’s optional. I’m not sure why that’s a reason to hate C? Just don’t use it, nobody does.

@@thebatchicle3429 I assumed anyone reading this would've seen my prior post and gotten that I meant "hate" sarcastically, and it was kind of a nudge towards what Tsoding said about C. However, I never referred to the environment variables argument as being a compiler extension, and it's technically a conforming implementation to provide access to the environment, even if the standard doesn't specify it be in a third argument. It could just as easily be provided in argv past argc, or even tacked onto the command line arguments with no boundary between the two, or with an empty string, as it's up to the implementation how to provide that as long as argv[argc] == NULL.

i didnt know cmake exists before i found myself moving away from the arduino ide to esp-idf couple of months ago. their build system is wrapped and interlocked with cmake up to a point where i didnt see myself having a chance at all to derive a "build.sh"-type notes-file that would allow me to stay in my cave. I went for the fumble-around-till-it-works approach and never looked back up till today. So definitly no divine intellect badge for me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I just use regular make

@@ukyoize its technically also a build system

@@PranshuTheGamer Sure, but nearly every Linux system comes with it pre-installed. Screw Windows and Mac.

@@anon_y_mousse yea, wait until you see porteus

Use bear(1) for that

@@thebatchicle3429 I didn't test that but are you sure bear can parse output of nob as well?

C-n and C-p

Original title was more interesting

That's not a suckless thing, it's an autoconf thing.

@@anon_y_mousse autoconf can generate c header files?

@@Vulto166 It can do a lot of things, including generate configure scripts. Check it out.

@@anon_y_mousseit’s also a Suckless thing

It literally fucking builds the entire raylib as part of the musializer build ffs

@@TsodingDaily awesome

The only greater invention was Free Pascal.

What's so special about topological sort and modification date checking?

ill do it