this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
414 points (96.6% liked)
Programmer Humor
32425 readers
789 users here now
Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
Rules:
- Posts must be relevant to programming, programmers, or computer science.
- No NSFW content.
- Jokes must be in good taste. No hate speech, bigotry, etc.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If (false) is good because it is compiled so it doesn't get stale.
"you're not wrong, you're just an asshole"
Fair enough, I do love being contrarian
A simple
if (false)will get optimized out by any modern C or C++ compiler with optimizations on, but the problem is that the compiler will still parse and spend time on what's inside the if-block and it has to be legal code, whereas with the#if 0trick the whole thing gets yeeted away by the preprocessor before even the compiler gets to look at it regardless of whether that block contains errors or not, it's literally just a string manipulation.I think you missed the whole point of my comment 😂. Regardless, the time spent compiling a small snippet of code is completely negligible. In the end, both
#if 0andif (false)have their complimentary uses.Yeah, but I still think
if (false)is silly because it adds an artificial constraint which is to make sure the disabled parts always compile even when you're not using them. The equivalent of that would be having to check that all the revisions of a single source file compile against your current codebase.If(false) works in interpreted languages, the other one doesn't. It's stupid either way, that's what version control is for, but if we are doing the stupidness anyway, you can't use preprocessor flags in many languages because shit doesn't get compiled.
Tell this to my -Wall -Werror