I agree with that, but null safety would be a big deal for correctness.

In the intern's place, I probably would not have bragged about copying that company's idea.

Then again, as the company, if I felt a former intern could threaten my business like that, I'd ask serious questions about my value proposition and moat (which could be premium features, sales, or an attractive/viral free tier - not too familiar with what they do). On a personal level, I can see how it could feel unfair, but the idea does not seem that original.

You cannot patent or copyright ideas. Furthermore it is quite debatable if it’s unethical to copy ideas.

What the intern did is absolutely fine in my book.

In the second example, buffer is still a pointer? If so, when does free run, and who decides that? When buffer goes out of scope, could do_stuff store the pointer some place else?

I find this an interesting thought experiment, basically types that you'd opt in to RAII. Just have a feeling that you'll need to define some notion of ownership to make it work.

Try-blocks with ~one line are best practice on code based I have worked with. The upside is that you can bubble errors up to the place where you handle them, AND get stack traces for free. As a huge fan of Result<T, E>, I have to admit that that's a possible advantage. But maybe that fits your definition of lazy :).

RIP. When I wasn't sure what to make of Goedel, Escher, Bach, his writings tipped the scale. Thanks!

Some of the in-house stuff was built before alternatives were available or scalable, and now there'd be a high cost and friction to trying to change it. Happens in many big companies that have been around for a few decades, it's not because of bad intentions.

As someone who hasn't thought about it that way yet: that's interesting!

Interesting. Though "ein Paar" is singular, "ein paar" is plural, making it clear from the context in many cases. Curiously, it's not clear in the case where it matters most: "please bring [ein [pP]aar Socken]". As an engineer, I'd say "please bring ein Sockenpaar" when I mean ein Paar, for clarity, for the low price of people thinking I'm weird.

Title should read "Extend a C project with Zig".

Exactly. So when people take"essential oils" or whatever to "detox" - yeah sure, you may feel a difference.

But that's probably because that substance you ingested wasn't healthy in the first place and what you're witnessing is your body trying to get rid of it fast.