Theme 1– Low‑level ABI quirks remain an obscure footnote
"I had never considered the idea of passing too few register params so I didn't immediately think of the reuse problem. And I had no idea about Itanium's Not-a-thing bit! Always a good read from Raymond Chen." — anitil Modern engineers may never hit these calling‑convention edge cases, but they still surface in discussions about legacy architectures.
Theme 2 – Concern about a generational knowledge gap / “vibe coding”
"Post COVID software engineer grads probably won't understand this comment." — Onavo
"Why? Because of LLM vibe coding?" — camkego
"Yeah. The next generation of software engineers is coming. Brace yourself." — dataflow The thread worries that newcomers, especially those using AI‑assisted coding, might miss the low‑level details that mattered in earlier eras.
Theme 3 – Subtle bugs in argument passing and return statements
"Yes. And in the second one he has return c; when he meant return b;" — billforsternz
"It's not even possible to pass too few arguments to a function in C unless you go out of your way to write bad code." — kst
Even tiny mismatches—like a missing brace, an incorrect return, or a mis‑declared parameter—can cause hard‑to‑track failures.