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Show HN: I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old

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Re: Show HN: I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old

#41

Post by junior44660 »

D4ckard wrote: post #40
pjmlp wrote: post #29

Congratulations, good luck with your projects. Compilers was one of the first rabbit holes that drove my interest into computing. One of the books that I endless read multiple times, is nowadays available for free, and eventually interesting for your reading collection, even though it is about the compiler part not debugging. "Compiler Design in C" https://holub.com/compiler/ It is a bit oldie, but maybe interesting.

Thank you for the link. I'm always looking for books on compilers, but they can be hard to find. Many of them are every from the ivory tower -like unfortunately.

Try "crafting interpreters", it's very practical book.

Re: Show HN: I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old

#42

Post by flykespice »

raarts wrote: post #17
jacknews wrote: post #11

Very well done, and I hope you build this out further, but please leave out the 'as a 17 yo'. I really don't think it's relevant and risks coming across as cloying - your work should (and does) stand on it's own.

As a (former) employer I definitely think his age is relevant.

Judging your candidate by age than skill is what perpetuates the gross ageism on the IT sector.

Gladly you got demoted from the position

Re: Show HN: I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old

#43

Post by up2isomorphism »

bluetomcat wrote: post #32

Looks especially clean, consistent and well-modularised, tackling a problem that requires non-trivial knowledge about binary formats and kernel APIs. Many "senior" programmers would struggle to build something like this even at a conceptual level. The antithesis of "kids these days" :-) Out of curiosity, how does a 17-year-old attain that level of knowledge? Books, peers, programming clubs, parents who are programmer…

Because there is no software engineering manager who likely does not write any useful code for a long time and is telling engineers what to do.

Re: Show HN: I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old

#44

Post by koolba »

D4ckard wrote: post #39
koolba wrote: post #26

First glance through the project and it seem well organized. Kudos! How long have you been programming and what languages did you start off with? I know quite a few developers decades older than you that still don't know how to write a Makefile [1]. What's the deal with the inline emojis in the source? Is that what all the cool kids are doing these days or does it just force you to be mindful of non-ASCII input? [1]:…

I started off learning Python and C++. At some point I got fed up with C++ and switched to C. Haha, the emoji thing was something I was doing for about a week or so. You see emojis used a lot more around Rust I guess. I never bothered to remove them. I think the bugs around the PID are fun. The ones in the comments might go at some point, though I didn't experience any problems with editors (Helix, Emacs, and VSCode…

> I started off learning Python and C++. At some point I got fed up with C++ and switched to C.

How many years and hours per day?

> Should I maybe disabled printing emojis to standard output in the REPL if terminal colors are disabled as well?

I generally avoid anything that's not ASCII if it's possible. Tying it to terminal colors or terminal output (e.g. "if [ -t 1 ] ...") is common too. Though I'm not a big fan of things changing based on the runtime environment as it makes debugging annoying.

Re: Show HN: I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old

#45

Post by xvilka »

D4ckard wrote: post #33
trmpakufnfee wrote: post #28

Awesome. I wish I had this level of dedication when I was young. I recommend you to participate in programs like Google Summer of Code, KDE Season of Code, Linux Foundation LFX, and X.org EVoC. There are some very interesting problems to solve. I wish I had known about them when I was student. Now I am working in Full time job, therefore have no time to contribute to open source. Keep up the good work.

Thanks for pointing me to those projects! I didn't know about any of them.

We (Rizin and Cutter) usually participate in GSoC, so if we are accepted next year as an organization, you could apply. See our previous programs[1][2][3].

[1] http://rizin.re/gsoc/2023/

[2] https://rizin.re/posts/gsoc-2023-announcement/

[3] https://rizin.re/posts/gsoc-2023-dwarf/

Re: Show HN: I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old

#46

Post by D4ckard »

IamDaedalus wrote: post #7

GGs dude I'm cloning the code and looking through tonight We share similar interests and I will try to make contributions to your project

Wow, this sounds great. Please hit me up at any time if you have questions about the code. I left behind comments most places, but I don't know if all of them are helpful.

Re: Show HN: I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old

#47

Post by spiralx »

Nice one, I remember writing a 2D graphics library in Turbo Pascal using embedded hand-optimised assembly for the actual drawing code when I was your age, but that was back before I discovered the internet so it ended up being something I'd enjoyed writing but never did anything with, so well done on taking the next step turning it from a personal project to one that other people can see and maybe use themselves - it all looks very tidy, well-commented and the README is clear.

Putting things out there for the world to see can be a scary thing, but remember that what people say is often as much about them than it is about your work, especially so when what they say is about you.

PS I'm actually more interested in Motes than this myself, going to experiment with it now :)

Re: Show HN: I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old

#48

Post by [deleted] »

up2isomorphism wrote: post #43
bluetomcat wrote: post #32

Looks especially clean, consistent and well-modularised, tackling a problem that requires non-trivial knowledge about binary formats and kernel APIs. Many "senior" programmers would struggle to build something like this even at a conceptual level. The antithesis of "kids these days" :-) Out of curiosity, how does a 17-year-old attain that level of knowledge? Books, peers, programming clubs, parents who are programmer…

Because there is no software engineering manager who likely does not write any useful code for a long time and is telling engineers what to do.

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old

#49

Post by [deleted] »

bluetomcat wrote: post #32

Looks especially clean, consistent and well-modularised, tackling a problem that requires non-trivial knowledge about binary formats and kernel APIs. Many "senior" programmers would struggle to build something like this even at a conceptual level. The antithesis of "kids these days" :-) Out of curiosity, how does a 17-year-old attain that level of knowledge? Books, peers, programming clubs, parents who are programmer…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I spent 6 months building a C debugger as a 17-year-old

#50

Post by superduty »

fuzzfactor wrote: post #21
smithza wrote: post #10

I want to only comment that your level of knowledge and maturity at the age of 17 is very impressive. The topics being investigated and exploited are expected at an undergraduate level and even then, this project would be in the Graduate level course. My hat is off to you and wish you a successful career.

I'm impressed too, this is an excellent head start. Years later as a still-young technology enthusiast it would be likely that even more impressive projects will be accomplished. By then it may be largely unknown how advanced this was at this young of an age. Simply because there will be other sharp minds that do impressive stuff but only got started in their 20's, and reaching the same age they would be considered b…

Why is the advantage of early learning and understanding “unfair”?
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