Lol lol

Someone on a C++ learning and help discord wanted to know why the following was causing issues.

char * get_some_data() {
char buffer[1000];
init_buffer(&buffer[0]);
return &buffer[0];
}

I told them they were returning a pointer to a stack allocated memory region. They were confused, didn't know what I was talking about.

I pointed them to two pretty decently written and succinct articles, the first about stack vs. heap, and the second describing the theory of ownership and lifetimes. I instructed to give them a read, and to try to understand them as best as possible, and to ping me with any questions. Then I promised to explain their exact issue.

Silence for maybe five minutes. They disregard the articles, post other code saying "maybe it's because of this...". I quickly pointed them back at their original code (the above) and said this is 100% an issue you're facing. "Have you read the articles?"

"Nope" they said, "I just skimmed through them, can you tell me what's wrong with my code?"

Someone else chimed in and said "you need to just use malloc()." In a C++ room, no less.

I said "@OtherGuy please don't blindly instruct people to allocate memory on the heap if they do not understand what the heap is. They need to understand the concepts and the problems before learning how C++ approaches the solution."

I was quickly PM'd by one of the server's mods and told that I was being unhelpful and that I needed to reconsider my tone.

Fuck this industry. I'm getting so sick of it.

Holy shit. Didn't know I had to vent this out before I had revisited this shit.

Storytime!

Back in May last year, I started working on a dream project (call project X) of mine. Surprisingly it's still a novel idea and shit like this doesn't exist. Made some huge incremental changes. Added all the necessary automation pipeline stuff. Added some sick ass readme with screenshots/badges/glitz/glam.

Worked my ass of for about a month or so until I got distracted by other pending projects in need of clearances. Somewhere partway in that clearance period, I receive a mail from this "GitHub user" asking me why the development of project X had suddenly stopped.

I was a bit taken aback. Firstly because my project had ZERO stars and NO user interaction. Secondly because I hadn't encountered someone with confrontation like this since my middle-school teacher asking me for my homework.

Being the good, responsible child I am, I informed them on my situation and asked them to contribute according to the guidelines and I'd be more than happy to see this becoming a joint effort by the community.

Apparently, they were quite ecstatic to learn that my development was halted. They didn't have plans to contribute. Instead they wanted me to take down the project and stop working on it entirely.

Tough luck fucko.

Their organization had been working on something similar for longer than a couple of years. A similar open-sourced project will *apparently* ruin their market impact and I can *apparently* be sued for it.

I don't know much about open-source "laws" (and I've seen laws fuck people over) but this just seems retarded. At the moment, I'm not quite sure how to continue with the project. I'll still work on it but the fact being that I started receiving threats before stars makes me question the gatekeeping capacity of toxic market conditions (I still don't blame the person entirely. It's just really hard to keep your head above the water)

This is a one off thing but somehow it has definitely hampered my drive to work on the project (combined with the sheer amount of pending project that I've dug my grave with).

On the brighter side I've got 10 anonymous stars with zero promotion. 2 new message threads with productive insights and a person who says "I'm relying on this to work out". So not everything has gone to shit.

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