[bitbasher]

Yes and no.

Have you looked at the code? It was clearly generated in one form or another (see the other comments).

The author created a new GitHub account and this is their first repository. It looks to be generated from another code base as a sorta amalgamation (either through code generation, ai, or another means).

We're supposed to implicitly trust this person (new GitHub account, first repository, no commit history, 10k+ lines of complicated code).

Jia Tan worked way too hard, all they had to do was upload a few files and share on HN :)

[throwaway27448]

> We're supposed to implicitly trust this person

That would be rather foolish even with a fully viewable history.

I don't understand why you're so worked up about this—nobody is forcing you to use the code.

[convolvatron]

I think there are 3 levels at play here. One is code as curation, a model I'm not particularly interested in. Clearly the publisher, despite not being paid, is a supplicant. and as a curator I'm as much or more interested the in process being used and the longetivity of the code base.

The second is code as artifact. Is this code useful, performant, with a reasonable API.

The third is code as concept, or architecture. This is really what interests me here. I use explicit allocators any time I can get away with it, and it's an excellent tool for involved systems projects. I'm not really interested in using this code, but having implemented these things many times, looking at how other people made the various tradeoffs, how it all came together, is really valuable input for when I'm going to do this again. Maybe there are some really brand new ideas here.

While I'm unsympathetic to the first perspective, it's valid. But I don't think its fair to castigate someone who put something on GitHub for not meeting someones adoption criteria.

[throwaway27448]

If you have a need for vetted & customizable & extensible allocators, I recommend https://github.com/emeryberger/Heap-Layers

In the meantime, I don't see much value from your criticism of this particular project. I don't think this is a great example of AI slop even if it is generated, and you haven't clearly articulated harm.

[MaulingMonkey]

> no commit history, 10k+ lines of complicated code

This kind of pattern is incredibly common when e.g. a sublibrary of a closed source project is extracted from a monorepository. Search for "_LICENSE" in the source code and you'll see leftover signs that this was indeed at one point limited to "single-process-package hardware" for rent extraction purpouses.

Now, for me, my bread and butter monorepos are Perforce based, contain 100GB+ of binaries (gamedev - so high-resolution textures, meshes, animation data, voxely nonsense, etc.) which take an hour+ to check out the latest commit, and frequently have mishandled bulk file moves (copied and deleted, instead of explicitly moved through p4/p4v) which might mean terrabytes of bandwidth would be used over days if trying to create a git equivalent of the full history... all to mostly throw it away and then give yourself the added task of scrubbing said history to ensure it contains no code signing keys, trade secrets, unprofessional easter eggs, or other such nonsense.

There are times when such attention to detail and extra work make sense, but I have no reason to suspect this is one of them. And I've seen monocommits of much worse - typically injested from .zip or similar dumps of "golden master" copies, archived for the purpouses of contract fulfillment, without full VCS history.

Even Linux, the titular git project, has some of these shenannigans going on. You need to resort to git grafts to go earlier than the Linux-2.6.12-rc2 dump, which is significantly girthier.

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/1da177e4c3f41524e88...

0 parents.

> It looks to be generated from another code base as a sorta amalgamation (either through code generation, ai, or another means).

I'm only skimming the code, but other posters point out some C macros may have been expanded. The repeated pattern of `(chunk)->...` reminds me of a C-ism where you defensively parenthesize macro args in case they're something complex like `a + b`, so it expands to `(a + b)->...` instead of `a + b->...`.

One explaination for that would be stripping "out of scope" macros that the sublibrary depends on but wishes to avoid including.

> We're supposed to implicitly trust this person

Not necessairly, but cleaner code, git history, and a more previously active account aren't necessairly meant to suggest trust either.

[MaulingMonkey]

> One explaination for that would be stripping "out of scope" macros that the sublibrary depends on but wishes to avoid including.

Another explaination would be the original source being multi-file, with the single-file variant being generated. E.g. duktape ( https://github.com/svaarala/duktape ) generates src-custom/duktape.c from src-input/*/*.c ( https://github.com/svaarala/duktape/tree/master/src-input ) via python script, as documented in the Readme:

https://github.com/svaarala/duktape/tree/master?tab=readme-o...