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JeanHeyd Meneide
Personal blog · thephd.devprogrammingwriting
JeanHeyd Meneide writes The Pasture, a personal blog at thephd.dev about programming and writing. Since 2021, 113 different Hacker News readers have linked it 181 times, most often “Embed is in C23”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link JeanHeyd Meneide's blog for detailed writing on C and C++ standards work, including the embed, defer and ABI proposals. Commenters cite posts as sources on C23, C2y and language design.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- One commenter says the embed story is fascinating and the feature interesting; another calls the writing style idiosyncratic but says the author is brilliant. A
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The musings, ideas, discussions, and sometimes silly words from a digital sheep magician
Most-linked posts?
- Embed is in C2317 people · 19 mentions · first linked 2022-07-22
- I Am No Longer Speaking at RustConf 202312 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2023-05-26
- Conformance Should Mean Something: Fputc, and Freestanding8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2022-04-18
- The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time8 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2025-03-16
- To save C, we must save ABI7 people · 11 mentions · first linked 2022-03-13
- Binary Banshees and Digital Demons6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-09-23
- Undefined Behavior, and the Sledgehammer Principle6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-02-03
- Lambdas, Nested Functions, and Blocks (2021)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-07-17
- A Special Kind of Hell: intmax_t in C and C++ (2020)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2021-10-03
- Improving _Generic in C2y4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-08-01
What Hacker News says?
> Divide by zero must be undefined behavior in any performant language. On x86 you either have a if before running the divide (which of course in some cases the compiler can optimize out, but only if it can determine the value is not zero); or you the CPU will trap into the OS - different OSes handle this in different ways, but most not in a while that makes it possible to figure out where you were and thus do somet…
Comment linking /finally-embed-in-c23
on “Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++”Submitted Embed is in C23 as a story · 483 points
HN discussionJeanHeyd's side of the RustConf thing: https://thephd.dev/i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023
Comment linking /i-am-no-longer-speaking-at-rustconf-2023
on “Matt Godbolt sold me on Rust by showing me C++”Submitted C23 is finished: Here is what is on the menu as a story · 257 points
HN discussionNot really, https://thephd.dev/to-save-c-we-must-save-abi-fixing-c-funct...
Comment linking /to-save-c-we-must-save-abi-fixing-c-function-abi
on “The computers are fast, but you don't know it”Submitted The Cost of a Closure in C as a story · 212 points
HN discussion> Stories of people trying their best to participate in the C++-standard committee process across multiple years This links to: https://thephd.dev/finally-embed-in-c23 It was a fascinating story, particularly about how people finally coming to terms with accepting that a seemly ugly way of doing things really is the best way (you just can't "parse better"). The feature itself is interesting too. https://gcc.godbolt.…
Comment linking /finally-embed-in-c23
on “The two factions of C++”Submitted Why not just do simple C++ RAII in C? as a story · 188 points
HN discussionAn incbin-like facility is coming to the standard: https://thephd.dev/finally-embed-in-c23
Comment linking /finally-embed-in-c23
on “Olive.c: a simple graphics library that does not have any dependencies”Submitted To save C, we must save ABI as a story · 175 points
HN discussionThe article spends a fair bit of time discussing the build speed and memory use problems with that approach. Like, the benchmark results [0] linked to from this post literally have xxd as one of the rows. It's not a viable option for embedding megabytes of data. [0] https://thephd.dev/embed-the-details#results
Comment linking /embed-the-details
on “Embed is in C23”Submitted The Defer Technical Specification: It Is Time as a story · 131 points
HN discussionAgree with a lot of what you said. Definitely to a lot of corporations C++17 was the peak of the language. Apple prioritized Swift afterwards and Google started doing Carbon and begrudgingly accepted Rust. First time hearing about the embed issue and god that person’s experience is awful: https://thephd.dev/finally-embed-in-c23 and it feels like a job for only the best project managers.
Comment linking /finally-embed-in-c23
on “Rust in Android: move fast and fix things”Submitted Progress on C23 as a story · 98 points
HN discussion> By the way the difference is that Rust is not a standard, thus is easier to evolve (the process is much shorter). Another thing is ABI. C and C++ are ABI-stable, which means that many historic mistakes (intmax_t, std::regex, polymorphic allocators) are impossible to fix. Rust only promises source compatibility, not ABI compatibility, so it has a lot more freedom to tweak its design. https://thephd.dev/binary-bansh…
Comment linking /binary-banshees-digital-demons-abi-c-c++-help-me-god-please
on “Rust 1.56.0 and Rust 2021”Submitted Any Encoding, Ever – ztd.text and Unicode for C++ as a story · 98 points
HN discussionAll three of the languages you list are still actively updated. Coincidentally, the latest standard for all three of them is from 2023(ish): - C23: https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n3096.pdf - Cobol 2023: https://www.incits.org/news-events/news-coverage/available-n... (random press release since a PDF of the standard didn't immediately show up in a search) - Fortran 2023: https://wg5-fortran.org/N220…
Comment linking /c2y-hitting-the-ground-running
on “Why Is SQLite Coded In C”Submitted The Wonderfully Terrible World of C and C++ Text Encoding APIs (With Some Rust) as a story · 61 points
HN discussionhttps://thephd.dev/c-the-improvements-june-september-virtual...
Comment linking /c-the-improvements-june-september-virtual-c-meeting
on “Why does calloc exist? (2016)”Submitted Why the C Language Will Never Stop You from Making Mistakes as a story · 53 points
HN discussionSome people are still dealing with DSPs. https://thephd.dev/conformance-should-mean-something-fputc-a... Me? I just dabble with documenting an unimplemented "50% more bits per byte than the competition!" 12-bit fantasy console of my own invention - replete with inventions such as "UTF-12" - for shits and giggles.
Comment linking /conformance-should-mean-something-fputc-and-freestanding
on “C++ proposal: There are exactly 8 bits in a byte”Submitted Improving _Generic in C2y as a story · 51 points
HN discussionC standard _may_ eventually have a feature semantically equivalent, but very different syntactically: https://thephd.dev/_vendor/future_cxx/technical%20specificat... Discussion: https://thephd.dev/_vendor/future_cxx/papers/C%20-%20Improve...
Comment linking /_vendor/future_cxx/papers/C%20-%20Improved%20__attribute__%28%28cleanup%29%29%20Through%20defer.html
on “Giving C a superpower: custom header file (safe_c.h)”Submitted 5 Years Later: The First Win as a story · 46 points
HN discussionI realize I used FOSS improperly, I had no reason to single it out; my comment reads like a critique of open source which was not my intention. My intention was to make a good case for old code being compiled today by third parties. But to my understanding intmax_t was introduced in C99, before widespread dominance of 64 bits platforms. So it would not be surprising that there exists code with lower assumptions abou…
Comment linking /intmax_t-hell-c++-c
on “C23 is finished: Here is what is on the menu”Submitted Lambdas, Nested Functions, and Blocks (2021) as a story · 44 points
HN discussionI mentioned this in another article of mine. Robert Seacord closed the loop on "how do I print numbers the non-shit way?" in C23 with N2680: https://thephd.dev/c-the-improvements-june-september-virtual... https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg14/www/docs/n2680.pdf
Comment linking /c-the-improvements-june-september-virtual-c-meeting
on “C23 is finished: Here is what is on the menu”Submitted Binary Banshees and Digital Demons as a story · 43 points
HN discussionAttributes, mostly. Which have become so common that defer is very likely to be in the next C standard. [0] bool function_with_cleanup(void) { // Allocate first resource int* buffer1 __attribute__((__cleanup__(free))) = malloc(sizeof(int) * 100); if(!buffer1) { return false; } // Allocate second resource int* buffer2 __attribute__((__cleanup__(free))) = malloc(sizeof(int) * 200); if(!buffer2) { return false; } // Op…
Comment linking /c2y-the-defer-technical-specification-its-time-go-go-go
on “Faster interpreters in Go: Catching up with C++”Submitted A Special Kind of Hell: intmax_t in C and C++ (2020) as a story · 32 points
HN discussion
