Jroweboy

I’m disappointed. I expected some obscure edgecase (like “Main is usually a function…” [1]) but instead that’s about scope handling, contract design and responsibility shift.

“Hello world” method simply calls an API to a text interface. It uses simple call, to a simple interface that is expected to be ever present. I don’t find any bug there. It won’t work if such interface isn’t available, is blocked or doesn’t exist. It won’t work on my coffee grinder nor on my screwdriver. It won’t work on my Arduino because there is no text interface neither.

Of course, one could argue that user might expect you to handle that error. That’s all about contracts and expectation. How should I deal with that? Is the “Hello world” message such important that the highest escalated scenario should be painted on the sky? I can imagine an awkward social game where we throw each other obscure challenges and call it a bug.

It’s nitpicking that even such simple code might fail and I get it. It will also fail on OOM, faulty hardware or if number of the processes on the machine hit the limit. Maybe some joker replaced bindings and it went straight to 3D printer which is out of material? _My expectations_ were higher based on the title.

Now allow me to excuse myself, I need to write an e-mail to my keyboard manufacturer because it seems like it has a bug which prevents it from working when slightly covered in liquid coffee.

[1]:…

The author says “I tried to define ‘main’ as an array of shorts with a modern compiler and it did not like that one bit”, but without saying which modern C compiler or what it didn’t like about it.

This sort of trick should still be possible with modern compilers. GCC has the charming warning

warning: ‘main’ is usually a function [-Wmain]

if main is declared as something other than a function.

Here’s someone who got it to work in 2015, anyway: http://jroweboy.github.io/c/asm/2015/01/26/when-is-main-not-a-function.html