You collapse the superposition of possible solutions by observing one already made and constrain your future timeline to a less novel outcome. You can always go back and look at someone else's solution afterwards. You can never get back the novelty of the first, uninformed try.

I like how C89 needs all variable declarations to be written at the top of a scope. Even better is to put all of them at the top of a function. This way, it is easy to get a feel for the stack memory requirement of the function, as it mirrors what happens in the assembly.

Terry A. Davis (1969-2018) Creator of TempleOS and the HolyC programming language.

There are times when I need to know what macros a C compiler has defined by default. This can be useful for learning information not otherwise known in the available set of standard C headers.

Reflection-free printing & serialization in C89 with X macros.

"When it looks elegant because it magically solves your problem, that means your bugs are also magical." There's also a compelling argument against ZII in this talk around the 15 minute mark: initialize memory such that the program will crash if it's not set correctly.

If you were stuck on a desert island and you could only choose one type of integer: signed or unsigned, which would it be? RobertElderSoftware explores this question here: blog.robertelder.org/signed-or-unsi…

The latest video by Eskil Steenberg covers how to catch and even log these memory mistakes, in C, using a clever allocator interface that you can build yourself. youtube.com/watch?v=sfrnU3…

twitch.tv/feoramund

A benchmark report from Dr. Dobb's Journal, August 1986 shows that there were no less than twelve C compilers at this point in history, 14 years after C's inception. C had not even been standardized yet.

There are no synchronization primitives in C89, you say? Here, look, a simple mutex in half a page of x86-64 assembly that can be called with ease; now you have mutexes in C89.

This is one of the most thorough articles on strict aliasing I've seen. gist.github.com/shafik/848ae25…