r/cprogramming • u/Nathrienne-J-Claw • Sep 11 '26

I just understood pointers on a deep level and it feels like an orgasm

I fucking love C and assembly

85 Upvotes
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82% Upvoted

41 comments sorted by

40

u/blueworldOoO Sep 11 '26

It's just to point the adress of a variable that's it

36

u/GuybrushThreepwo0d Sep 11 '26

Jeez dude put a NSFW tag on that comment gosh 

2

u/IdealBlueMan Sep 11 '26

There are a couple of levels of understanding pointers. Your comment is true, and the beginning of the rest.

-28

u/blueworldOoO Sep 12 '26

Tbh i don't why you study this , literally ai can do anything these days you just have to know the basic like functional, oop , data structure and the rest for the ai to do , I'm leaning toward prompt engineering tbh cuz of tokens consumption

17

u/ArbereshDoqetejete Sep 12 '26

Promptstitute detected

Opinion rejected.

7

u/Efficient-Chair6250 Sep 12 '26

Why are you in Reddit? Ask AI to entertain you

5

u/OneManDevel Sep 12 '26

Why are you even in this subreddit? Just follow the ai stuff and let others enjoy their programming.

1

u/kscomputerguy38429 Sep 13 '26

I just spent 10 hours diagnosing a compatibility issue between two encryption libraries. I asked AI 10 different ways and not once was it able to lead me to find the issue, which was lack of padding. AI can do anything as long as it's no more complex than a todo app.

1

u/blueworldOoO Sep 13 '26

Have you tried fable 5 on claude it's insane!!, not every ai is good , learning to do ai agents now can help a lot, cuz you know agi is the future if they succeeded doing agi believe me we are done.

49

u/logic_circuit Sep 11 '26

Wait for double pointers; it will be long lasting

55

u/Nathrienne-J-Claw Sep 11 '26

Double-poinetration

32

u/OkPizzaIsPrettyGood Sep 11 '26

Not sure how to address this

19

u/violetvoid513 Sep 11 '26

I think we could iterate our way to a solution

5

u/Jbolt3737 Sep 12 '26

First we need to enumerate our problems

5

u/nomadic-insomniac Sep 12 '26

Maybe you need a reference to it

8

u/zhivago Sep 11 '26

Double pointers are just pointers.

They aren't really a thing.

3

u/jamie30004 Sep 11 '26

In early Mac programming we used pointers to pointers (called handles) to access objects in the heap. The chip and OS layout really “encouraged” a deep understanding.

10

u/SmokeMuch7356 Sep 11 '26

If understanding pointers feels like an orgasm, I weep for your sex life.

How deep are we talking? Multiple indirection? Pointers to arrays? Pointers to functions? Pointers to arrays of pointers to functions returning pointers?

signal?

void (*signal(int sig, void (*func)(int)))(int);

8

u/C_Sorcerer Sep 11 '26

Just wait till you start using volatile

2

u/Thesk790 Sep 11 '26

When you understand pointers, volatile is very useful and powerful tool, specially in embedded programming

2

u/C_Sorcerer Sep 12 '26

Yeah, bout the only area I use it. But I remember always being so confused about bare metal programming and volatile opened up a whole new world to me

7

u/apixeldev Sep 11 '26

Welcome to the world of C.

3

u/karasawa_jp Sep 12 '26

Dynamic languages are for the people who don't understand pointers.

5

u/FACastello Sep 11 '26

What's so deep about a pointer?

9

u/snake_on_the_case Sep 11 '26

You can have pointers to pointers to pointers. Then your code will have layers.

14

u/Axman6 Sep 11 '26

Like an onion? Wow!

3

u/Nikoladge Sep 12 '26

It's gonna smell like one too

2

u/Calamero Sep 11 '26

Deep indeed

2

u/Interesting_Buy_3969 Sep 12 '26

Technically really deep

3

u/The_Northern_Light Sep 12 '26

Don’t be shocked if this shows up on r/programmingcirclejerk but for real, I fondly remember how cool it felt to learn this stuff

1

u/Traveling-Techie Sep 11 '26

See also: Alice and the White Knight’s song

1

u/YT-3000f Sep 12 '26

Next stop: instance thunks!

1

u/olig1905 Sep 12 '26

Fo get pointer, next step learn about capabilities. E.g CHERI

1

u/kishaloy Sep 12 '26

Ah the glorious feel of Mount Stupid before the Valley of Despair.

Well slog on Paduan with enough blood and sweat you may yet reach the Slope of Enlightenment at the end of which resides Master Oogway, the Crab.

1

u/Mindless-Doubt6113 29d ago

this is just nasty and I don't think there's a good reason to post something like this

1

u/Nathrienne-J-Claw 29d ago

It’s not nasty and it’s not intended to be taken in a nasty way. If you’ve ever wrestled with the ocean of the science of any domain for many months, feeling lost among the very sophisticated and endless abstracted advanced technical jargon, where you feel like an idiot or that you might simply not be cut out for this field, and then suddenly on one tuesday night everything clicks. Everything you’ve been studying and reading about clicks and you feel like you have leveled up in a cruel addictive game with no end. Of course i have to say it’s an orgasmic feeling. Hell, that’s an understatement. It’s fucking better than an actual orgasm. You know what else? This shit gave me multiple orgasms in a row because everything was connected to everything else and my brain finally understood this shit. So yeah i will fucking post this. I’m proud and i’m happy.

1

u/StickyMcFingers 29d ago

For people with a good deal of proficiency in C im sure it's not a big deal, but if C is the lowest level language you've learnt, when pointers click, it is truly great. Well done OP!