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Show HN: I wrote a BitTorrent Client from scratch

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Re: Show HN: I wrote a BitTorrent Client from scratch

#43
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

"convert length string into an integer" is a machine generated comment? I've been writing code for 15+ years, this made me laugh my ass off. Comments are great, I don't read comments but I write them for others, especially for open source code. Atoi may be something you and I and a whole bunch of others know but people who don't it's a fine comment. Relax! :)

That comment is a strong sign that this was AI-generated. LLMs have the tendency to leave superfluous comments even when the code is self-explanatory. In this case, strconv is a well-known stdlib package, and anyone reading this in their IDE would get the documentation for what it does. In fact, all of the comments in this function and in most of the file are redundant, and I would point this out in a code review.

But, of course, this was vibe coded, so it's unlikely a human actually reviewed it.

Re: Show HN: I wrote a BitTorrent Client from scratch

#44
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

what's up with the amount of new accounts praising this project?

[flagged]

You're probably getting downvoted because there are local conventions against astroturfing/shillage/botting accusations described in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

If you think there's something wrong with the post email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com

Re: Show HN: I wrote a BitTorrent Client from scratch

#47

This is cool! I’ve been thinking about something like this as well. How hard was it, and do you have a sense for how “complete” it is? Does it handle DHT and Magnet and all the crazy NAT traversal stuff? I’m guessing the main obstacle for me has always been that I’m not sure what the complete list of features is to have a client that will just work for the majority of torrents in the wild. It seems like there are doz…

it was challenging for sure. Took me almost a month to get acquainted with the protocol, how bencoding works etc, build a mental model and then eventually writing code. Magnet and DHT are yet to be added.

In my experience, magnet is pretty straightforward. Dht is quite the rabbit hole, and it might be difficult finding clients that support dht (not everyone does)

Re: Show HN: I wrote a BitTorrent Client from scratch

#48

As a non go developer, may I ask why you're using older go version 1.21? Is there a reason to stay with older releases? EDIT: It seems like it was deprecated 10 months ago

Windows 7 support is one reason to stick to older GoLang releases. A project in Go 1.21.4 or earlier will work on every Windows release and any computer made since 2009, whereas a version bump to v1.21.5 means it will only work on more recent computers and Win10 and 11 for no benefit.

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/64622

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