It reminds me of an incident involving an old colleague of mine at some kind of graduate recruitment fair thing. He walked past a stand which was trying to hire engineers which had some code on the wall when the following exchange happened:
Recruiter: Hey there! <indicates the code> Do you know what this is?
Colleague: Err, <looks…thinks for a bit>… It *looks* like some sort of network protocol
Recruiter: <smug> No, it’s *COMPUTER CODE*
I like to pause movies when some code is shown and see what it is. Apparently you can break into pentagon by knowing basic sql and high-level employees have alternate life writing tcp implementations and graphics libraries.
Its crazy to me how little effort publishers put into the basic parts of their job sometimes. Its even funnier that raymond chen of all people is the one calling this out
On the matter of book back text, The Profit by Kehlog Albran has a rear blurb that likens the style of the author to that of a man with a much larger brain.
If you don't want to be called out for putting zero effort into the books that you publish, you probably shouldn't put zero effort into the books you publish!
This sounds reasonable if your use case is squeezing more horsepower out of Node applications and the JavaScript part has already been pushed to its limits.
As someone who's done lots of backend development _in_ node though, I'm not really proficient in C++ enough nor I ever had teams able to maintain such modules.
I'm not criticizing your approach, mind you, it's absolutely understandable, just uncommon for someone to be really proficient at both languages.
Plot twist: the publisher just looked into the future. I’m currently building an EBNF parser for my project, C³ (C cubed), which allows you to define arbitrary grammar at the very beginning of a file to seamlessly mix strings and syntax from Python, JS, or any custom DSL.
While C++ was just a simple iteration, C³ aims to be a paradigm shift. If you see JavaScript DOM manipulation code on a C++ book cover, it’s not a stock photo blunder anymore — it’s just a valid source file after a custom EBNF header. The project is currently in private development, but I'm considering launching it as an online service. Stay tuned!
SELECT * FROM military_bases
On a public dataset :)
I guess the brilliant hacking was the bit you don’t see getting access to the super secure database in the first place?
Probably not a good look back at publishing hq
My understanding is that authors often have little or not control over the covers chosen by their publishers.
It's at least possible that the book itself is excellent, but I'm not going to spend $90+ on a hardcover copy to find out.
I have not seen much, if any, JavaScript developers touching C++ modules much beyond library authors needing bindings for SQLite, etc.
Knowing how to write native modules is one blog post less on "We rewrote X in Y" on HN frontage.
You might argue why not using something else in first place, well in consulting quite often we have tl adapt to the customer IT stack.
Concrete example deploying into Vercel Functions, and there is a small performance boost required.
Nowadays I would rather push for Go or Rust runtime, but until this year they weren't officially supported, as they were community runtime builds.
In any case, I expect someone doing backend development to actually understand performance, and how to improve it.
As someone who's done lots of backend development _in_ node though, I'm not really proficient in C++ enough nor I ever had teams able to maintain such modules.
I'm not criticizing your approach, mind you, it's absolutely understandable, just uncommon for someone to be really proficient at both languages.
fwiw, i stopped keepin up with c++ in 2003. saved my sanity!
While C++ was just a simple iteration, C³ aims to be a paradigm shift. If you see JavaScript DOM manipulation code on a C++ book cover, it’s not a stock photo blunder anymore — it’s just a valid source file after a custom EBNF header. The project is currently in private development, but I'm considering launching it as an online service. Stay tuned!
https://gitlab.com/9o1d/C3v3