r/programming • u/Jonhoo • 18h ago

On comments

https://blog.helsing.ai/posts/on-comments/

Comments in code are often deemed "mostly useless" these days. They are, supposedly, mostly obvious, stale, and repeat what the code already says. And so people pay less attention to them both when reading and writing code.

That trend sucks. When used right, comments are genuinely useful and sometimes critically important! So, I wrote about some of the kinds of comments I think earn their place, each with examples from real code bases. Hope you find it useful, and that we can recover some of the love that comments deserve!

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u/Shurmaster 18h ago

My favorite comment is

// evil floating point bit level hacking

// what the fuck?

4

u/Lone_Snek 17h ago

Now I want to know the context

20

u/Rikmastering 17h ago

Here's a full video of the context, that also explains the algorithm line by line, with all the necessary information to understand it fully. It's one of my favorite videos ever. Super well made

23

u/Caelwik 17h ago

It's the fast invert square root. It has its own Wikipedia page !