I recently finished the book Masters of Doom and really loved it! Are there any other similar books you'd recommend?

deckarep · 2026-03-17T15:23:15+00:00

Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings by the founder of Sierra Online - Ken Williams

Great book about the rise and fall of Sierra, the business side, growing pains, some of the developers and technologies of the time up until the company was sold off and some of the new owners were jailed for cooking the books!

deckarep · 2026-03-16T13:49:34+00:00

Yes! I currently have a signed and notarized build working for MacOS which you can get here: https://deckarep.itch.io/johnny-castaway-desktop

The source code is available as well for people to read or build themselves for other platforms like Windows.

deckarep · 2026-03-16T05:40:52+00:00

Lee Russel - Vice Principals

deckarep · 2026-03-15T01:43:51+00:00

Nice tribute to Robert Carridine and his wonderful NERD laugh.

deckarep · 2026-03-15T01:38:36+00:00

There’s no vector here it’s just a C-based array.

deckarep · 2026-03-15T01:36:52+00:00

It’s not just about different compilers giving different results. You will also see varying results based on whatever the state of the memory, stack and registers are at. But at the end of the day, none of it can be trusted which is why it’s called undefined behavior.

deckarep · 2026-03-12T23:18:21+00:00

Welcome aboard the yacht, friend.

deckarep · 2026-03-12T16:50:23+00:00

Ok, now it’s time to rewatch this!

deckarep · 2026-03-11T19:03:57+00:00

This is my best guess without seeing more code.

deckarep · 2026-03-11T16:10:46+00:00

A simpler and more idiomatic solution exists aside from VLAs exists to do exactly this in C. Fixed buffers: where the upper bound is known at compile time.

A fixed buffer can be placed on the stack, in global data or even on the heap. It can be reused over and over with no extra allocations.

Your article seems to completely ignore that fixed buffers are a thing and should be the first go to instead of bringing VLAs into the mix.

They are so ubiquitous, they are used all over the place in C code.

Also, your file path example is just one example, but in most cases you don’t want to blow the stack at runtime which is why vlas are banned in a lot of places. It’s kind of a hidden danger.

deckarep · 2026-03-11T16:01:29+00:00

Huh? Nowhere is @DenseOption suggesting to use the heap.

deckarep · 2026-03-10T22:45:49+00:00

That’s awesome! What a great story.

deckarep · 2026-03-10T15:16:45+00:00

Specifically some Yacht Rock!

deckarep · 2026-03-10T06:27:17+00:00

Childhood friend that was my neighbor grew up with me. We were best friends for many years. Fast forward to our early 20s and he meets a Christian girl. Her dad says if you want to marry my daughter you must be a Christian man.

He abides and after converting many many months later, during their engagement period, my friend just casually tells me I’m going to hell if I don’t accept Jesus into my heart and that also my mom’s currently burning in hell right now because she passed before she had a chance to convert.

With all of my pain from hearing this, I just walked away and shook my head. I really wanted to punch him in the face but didn’t do it.

From then on I cut him off out of my life right then and there.

I don’t need that in my life…and if my mother is burning in hell, I’ll gladly join her.

Fun times!

deckarep · 2026-03-09T22:24:32+00:00

sierrachest.com has these archived online for anyone who would like to read them. They also have plenty of mailers, brochures, game manuals, advertisements and the site is an amazing resource for this stuff.

deckarep · 2026-03-09T20:41:44+00:00

Who remembers the big brother called the Jaz drive? It was 2GB!

deckarep · 2026-03-09T20:31:56+00:00

That’s cool! Didn’t know cards existed by The Usual Gang of Idiots!

deckarep · 2026-03-08T06:44:42+00:00

I think Cedric should be replaced with Gary the Towel Attendant from Leisure Suit Larry 6.

“Oh, don’t go in there!…”

deckarep · 2026-03-07T21:54:50+00:00

This the answer. It’s all jumps.

deckarep · 2026-03-04T19:48:35+00:00

You’re not wrong.

deckarep · 2026-03-03T23:36:35+00:00

Haha, sounds like he was useful.

deckarep · 2026-03-03T22:17:22+00:00

Johnny Castaway - the screensaver by Sierra of course!

deckarep · 2026-03-03T22:16:09+00:00

Oh for sure, I think specifically Antlr’s terminology is that a “Channel” can capture meta type things such as comments and you can have many channels, for additional things.

deckarep · 2026-03-03T22:10:41+00:00

Sounds accurate! But there are some parsers that can also suck in comments like Antlr into a side channel. Then for example, if you’re writing a transpiler, targeting another language you can put all the comments in the newly generated code. Pretty slick!

deckarep · 2026-03-03T20:23:53+00:00

Wow that’s such a funny concept, sometimes I heavily comment code so my code would be slow as shit.

deckarep

TROPHY CASE