I can also tell you that this was written with Claude.
No issues with that in principle but I definitely would not trust Claude to get this stuff correct. Generally, it is quite bad at this kind of thing and usually in ways that are not obvious to people without experience.
This repo is full of so many strange and hilarious things. Look, I'm a lisper, and this is even too many parentheses for me https://github.com/xtellect/spaces/blob/master/spaces.c#L471...
One big commit definitely doesn’t help with creating confidence in this project.
There was once a time when sharing code had a social obligation.
This attitude you have isn't in the same spirit. GitHub (or any forge) was never meant to be a garbage dumping ground for whatever idea you cooked up at 3AM.
I don’t owe it to anyone to show how the sausage was made. Once it’s out the door and public, things are different. But before then? No one was the moral right to see all my mistakes leading up to the first release.
When you share code it's presumably for people to use. It is often useful to have commit history to establish a few things (trust in the author, see their thought process, debug issues, figure out how to use things, etc).
> You completely failed to establish why making a single commit is indicative of it being garbage.
A single commit doesn't mean it's garbage. It erodes trust in the author and the project. It makes it hard for me to use the code, which is presumably why you share code.
My garbage code response was in regards to the growing trend to code (usually with ai) some idea, slap an initial commit on it and throw it on GitHub (like using a napkin and tossing it in the rubbish bin).
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...