Top all-time · #2617
Corentin Jabot
Personal blog · cor3ntin.github.ioprogrammingsystems
Corentin Jabot writes cor3ntin, a personal blog at cor3ntin.github.io about programming and systems. Since 2018, 32 different Hacker News readers have linked it 52 times, most often “The Day The Standard Library Died (2020)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-04-19, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- The Day The Standard Library Died (2020)15 people · 20 mentions · first linked 2020-02-24
- The Problem with C (2020)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2020-09-01
- A Universal I/O Abstraction for C++ (2020)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2020-01-31
- Legacy Safety: The Wrocław C++ Meeting3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-12-02
- If we must, let's talk about safety (2022)2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-12-15
- Standard library development made easy with C++202 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-08-24
- Waiting for Std:Embed: Large Arrays in Clang2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-01-06
- C++ Modules are not a tooling opportunity2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2018-11-01
What Hacker News says?
A stable ABI can effectively kill a language. https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/
Comment linking /posts/abi/
on “Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++”Submitted A Universal I/O Abstraction for C++ (2020) as a story · 113 points
HN discussionThat's a current topic of discussion for C++20 and beyond. https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/sandiego/#deprecate-comma-o...
Comment linking /posts/sandiego/
on “Fortran is still a thing”Submitted Translation Units Considered Harmful? as a story · 110 points
HN discussionI am not an expert in C++, but there exists an opinion that it will not help as much as you might think. https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/modules/
Comment linking /posts/modules/
on “Httpserver.h: Single header library for writing non-blocking HTTP servers in C”Submitted The Problem with C (2020) as a story · 95 points
HN discussionIt still doesn't negate my point. You need to rely on other people's code. Whether it std lib or not. Left pad is because of: A) ease of modularization B) problems with tree shaking C) people want small easily understandable library Which tbh works more often than not. ---- Stable ABI is a curse as much as blessing. Once you have stable ABI, you will never want to break it. Even if breaking ABI would be beneficial l…
Comment linking /posts/abi/
on “Why Not Rust? (2020)”Submitted The problem with C as a story · 73 points
HN discussionAnd yet C, an even lower-level language, achieves the same effect without the duplication of PIMPL. You just forward-declare a struct, and declare functions that accept pointers to it: the header doesn't need to contain the struct fields, and you don't need to define any wrapper functions. Technically you can do the same in C++. But in C++ to make an idiomatic API you need methods instead of free functions, and you…
Comment linking /posts/abi/
on “Speeding up C++ build times”Submitted The Day The Standard Library Died (2020) as a story · 49 points
HN discussionBeing able to change things. It's like all downsides of backwards compatibility but on a binary level As to things ABI prevents: - scoped_lock was added to not break ABI by modifying lock_guard - int128_t has never been standardized because modifying intmax_t is an ABI break. Although if you ask me, intmax_t should just be deprecated. - unique_ptr could fit in register with language modifications, which would be nee…
Comment linking /posts/abi/
on “Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++”Submitted The problem with C according to a C++ developer as a story · 25 points
HN discussionA good write up of that is at https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/
Comment linking /posts/abi/
on “Carbon Language: An experimental successor to C++”Submitted The Day the C++ Standard Library Died as a story · 16 points
HN discussionC++ has a policy of not making changes that would break anyone's ABI, but still doesn't have an official one. https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/
Comment linking /posts/abi/
on “Bjarne Stroustrup Weighs in on Distributed Systems, Type Safety and Rust”Submitted Legacy Safety: The Wrocław C++ Meeting as a story · 10 points
HN discussionWithout the ability to break ABI, the C++ standard library is dead. "The Day The Standard Library Died" https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/ C++ ABI is also a joke. You can neither take advantage of it nor avoid it. Why have an ABI then ?
Comment linking /posts/abi/
on “Wrapping Up 2021. Leaving C++”Submitted The Day the Standard Library Died as a story · 8 points
HN discussion- a WG paper by a google employee regarding breaking the C++ ABI: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2020/p186... - A post about a C++ ABI break being voted against: https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/ I would not be surprised if google (or others in favor of breaking the ABI for the c++ standard library) would refocus on their alternate non-std std-replacement-ish library implementations (like abs…
Comment linking /posts/abi/
on “New C++ features in GCC 12”Submitted The Day the Standard Library Died as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThis is now a classic reading: (tldr: it is faster to call PHP process from C++ code and do regex in PHP than to use std::regex, and slow std::regex will never change because the Comittee doesn’t want to break ABI in favor of speed): https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/
Comment linking /posts/abi/
on “EASTL: An Alternative C++ Standard Library”Submitted A Universal I/O Abstraction for C++ as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe standard doesn't say it, but from context clues I presume GP meant "the c++ standard [committee] cares..."[1] And they do care deeply - here's a post from a C++ committee member discussing the issue: https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/ [1] Evidenced by the rest of the post talking about the committee, and referring to people a couple messages up thread: > And yet they can't update the standard library types to…
Comment linking /posts/abi/
on “The C++ Killers (Not You, Rust)”Submitted A Patchwork of Clang Patches as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> "how to make STL implementation less embarassing". The "STL" part of the standard library - containers especially but not just that - has an outdated interface, and suffers from ABI being stuck: https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/ so it's embarrassing regardless. > there still is no language support for e.g. debugging constexpr, or printing internal private state of objects in 3rd party code. Actually, reflectio…
Comment linking /posts/abi/
on “C++26: more constexpr in the core language”Submitted Legacy Safety: The Wrocław C++ Meeting as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMy problem is that if you're an actual C superset, you're carrying a lot of baggage that will permanently compromise the best case of what you can ever become. These days, with C standards back on a regular cadence, the thing you have to be a superset of is also a moving target, and you have to make sure your extensions don't end up incompatible with future C changes. If you succeed enough, the C standard has to be…
Comment linking /posts/c/
on “eC Programming Language”Submitted What is the C++ standard library? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionYeah but ABI stability isn't really just magic dust you sprinkle in you language/compiler and make it more stable It's a straightjacket that has application in few select cases. Things ABI prevents in C++: - better shared_ptr - adding UTF8 to regex - int128_t standardisation - make most of <cstring> constexpr And so on: https://cor3ntin.github.io/posts/abi/ I get you might have particular criteria on this. But it's…
Comment linking /posts/abi/
on “Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed”Submitted The Problem with C as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
