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Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

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Re: Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

#72

Post by ThatGeoGuy »

Capnproto by Kenton Varda https://capnproto.org>.

There have certainly been other contributors https://github.com/capnproto/capnproto/blob/master/CONTRIBUT...>, but Kenton does most of the development and maintenance on his own.

There are few things I lament more than having to spin up on a new serialization / file format and it isn't using Capnproto or Protobufs or some similar invention. Capnproto has truly spoiled me in terms of how consistent and feature rich it is for what seems like a "simple" task.

Re: Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

#73

Post by ihatepython »

Gigachad wrote: post #69
ihatepython wrote: post #17

/bin/false Does one thing and does it well

The code for this is surprisingly complex for a program that does nothing https://github.com/coreutils/coreutils/blob/master/src/true....

I stand corrected.

It's not very well written.

Re: Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

#74

Post by itisit »

mharig wrote: post #45

Wondered that nobody mentioned Latex. I didn't look at the source code, but Laslie Lamport said he would pay a price (1000 USD?) for every error detected, and AFAIR he never had to pay a single dime. So the code should be qualifying for 'excellent'.

Did Leslie say that? I know TeX creator Knuth has had a long-standing bug/typo/error bounty for his works.

Re: Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

#77

Post by ioblomov »

Loren Brichter’s iOS word game, Letterpress, was a one-person tour de force. Not only did he do the sound effects himself, but he apparently bypassed UIKit entirely using OpenGL calls. Kinda crazy, but then again he was on the original iPhone team…

https://www.imore.com/loren-brichter-talks-opengl-tweetie-le...

Re: Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

#78

Post by mharig »

itisit wrote: post #74
mharig wrote: post #45

Wondered that nobody mentioned Latex. I didn't look at the source code, but Laslie Lamport said he would pay a price (1000 USD?) for every error detected, and AFAIR he never had to pay a single dime. So the code should be qualifying for 'excellent'.

Did Leslie say that? I know TeX creator Knuth has had a long-standing bug/typo/error bounty for his works.

Oh, yes. I mixed up TeX and LaTeX. And the amount of the bug bounty, too. Sorry.

Re: Ask HN: What are some excellent pieces of software written by a single person?

#79

Post by thro1 »

thro1 wrote: post #75

LooknStop Firewall was the best - but who can tell what happened to the only author Frederic Gloannec ? Everything Search 1.5 Alpha by David Carpenter is available for testing ( https://www.voidtools.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=9787 ).

LnS: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/why-did-you-buy-look... (perfect stealth) + the ability to block at the level of every dll run by svhost till windows 7 - then the author disappear and no solution like that anymore (it used TDI removed after windows 8).
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