kcbanner's comments

kcbanner | 1 year ago | on: Zig's (.{}){} Syntax

It's not pointless, because you get to select exactly the design pattern that is best for the situation. Other languages may decide this for you.

kcbanner | 1 year ago | on: Zig's (.{}){} Syntax

You don't need to comment out the print function - it could gate its behavior on a comptime-known configuration variable. This would allow you to keep your debug variables in place.

kcbanner | 1 year ago | on: Zig's (.{}){} Syntax

After you've been writing zig for a while, seeing `.{}` in an argument list intuitively means "default arguments".

kcbanner | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: Those making $0/month or less on side projects – Show and tell

TurboSearch: A MSVC extension frontend for the excellent command line utility, The Silver Searcher (Ag).

https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=CaseyBan...

Price: $12

I use this tool myself daily as my main search tool inside MSVC. I built it because I was frustrated with how slow other tools were, and before I built this I would use ag in my console instead.

I've sold one copy, but I solved my own problem so I'm happy!

kcbanner | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What is something you built but never marketed?

I built TurboSearch, an ag frontend for MSVC: https://kcbanner.gumroad.com/l/turbosearch

I was frustrated with how slow and clunky all the existing solutions were for regex searches. The built in file search in MSVC has a UI that wastes a tonne of space (and the search itself is unuseably slow). Constantly changing to a terminal to run ag/grep and then open the file manually in MSVC was a pain, so I learned how to build an extension and put a GUI onto the command line tools I was already using.

Tools like Visual Assist are great if you want actual symbol indexing, but the searches (of a UE4) codebase can take 30-60s. TurboSearch can run a regex search of the entire engine in ~6s and searches of just the game code take ~200ms.

I have only sold one copy, but I use it every day and it's a core part of my workflow. I thought there would be more interest in it when I built it, but since I've gotten so much use out of it myself, the time spent building it was well worth it.

kcbanner | 3 years ago | on: Ask HN: What are some cool but obscure data structures you know about?

  "This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years,     in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal   operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array. Like the best programming tricks, this one is the right tool for the job in certain situations. The sleaziness of uninitialized data access is offset by performance improvements: some important operations change from linear to constant time."
https://research.swtch.com/sparse
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