this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2026
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Seriously! According to the time command in fish, cldr (my program) takes around 4-5 ms to print files, tldr takes 80-100ms. (PS, on my server, cldr actually takes less than 1 ms to fetch the file, while tldr takes closer to 150 ms. That's 150 times faster!!!)

This started a couple days ago when a friend of mine alerted me to the fact that the official tldr repo now takes ai contributions for their pages (aka the cheat sheet files that are printed) and for the actual program code. She then showed me a repo called ethical-tldr which does not allow for the use of ai contributions in the pages or program code.

However, their even though their client doesn't allow vibe coding, it is still written in Python, which itself takes ai contributions.

So, I decided to learn C from scratch and make my own tldr client that's faster and better than theirs in *every way! Introducing cldr! I am especially proud of the list and search functionality because the interface is just gorgeous.

Note, ABSOLUTELY NO AI was used in the making of this, I learned and wrote everything on my own in just the past 3 days, I don't think I even copied much or any code from websites.

*There's still like two things I haven't implemented that the official client does, but they're very minor and I'd be willing to bet that 99% of you won't know the difference.

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[–] logi@lemmy.world 76 points 6 days ago (3 children)

What your project desperately needs is a description of what it does. I had to follow the links to ethical-tldr back to the original tldr to see what it's supposed to do.

[–] girlnamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 53 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Ohh! That's a good point! Thanks! I just updated the README to provide an actual description.

[–] bookmeat@fedinsfw.app 38 points 6 days ago

The irony of a tldr missing from tldr...

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[–] tomenzgg@midwest.social 41 points 6 days ago

I could only wish to be this cool.

[–] inari@piefed.zip 54 points 6 days ago

This is an instance of that recurring trope of coding something better out of pure spite

[–] eleijeep@piefed.social 31 points 6 days ago (1 children)

So, I decided to learn C from scratch
...
on my own in just the past 3 days

Really impressive, great job! What resources did you use for learning?

[–] girlnamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 23 points 6 days ago (8 children)

Mostly just w3. Occasionally I had to look up some stuff for more “niche” use cases, but for the most part I just learned from w3.

I already have experience with programming in general, so the hardest part was learning the syntax, and strings… oh god strings are so bad in C, I had to make a new function called strfmt that works like printf but just for returning a formatted string.

[–] Gobbel2000@programming.dev 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Do you know about the sprintf function?

[–] girlnamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 4 points 6 days ago (1 children)

yes! However, I found it very frustrating to use and it kept leading to ludicrous errors beyond my wildest dreams. So I made my own function that works better and easier.

[–] for_some_delta@beehaw.org 15 points 6 days ago

Glad you are enjoying C. As one of my proffesor's espoused, "It is God's language". As a C++ developer, I cannot recommend {fmt} enough.

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[–] fruitcantfly@programming.dev 18 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (5 children)

This looks like a colossally bad idea:

  if (!strcmp(platform, "windows") && !isSpecificPlatform) {
    debugLog("Falling back to rm -rf", 2);
    debugLog(strfmt("rm -rf exited with code %d",system(strfmt("rm -rf %s", path))), 3);
  }

In addition,

However, their even though their client doesn’t allow vibe coding, it is still written in Python, which itself takes ai contributions.

Per the Makefile, this project is built using GCC. GCC itself accepts AI contributions, provided that the code is "legally insignificant" (meaning less than around 15 lines of code) or is part of test cases: https://gcc.gnu.org/ai-policy.html

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[–] kieron115@startrek.website 19 points 6 days ago
[–] shittydwarf@piefed.ca 21 points 6 days ago
[–] logi@lemmy.world 26 points 6 days ago (8 children)

So... C code is faster than python. We knew that. Thanks for the better performing rewrite. Now do it in rust 🤓

[–] inari@piefed.zip 28 points 6 days ago (2 children)
[–] syklemil@discuss.tchncs.de 28 points 6 days ago (1 children)
[–] Creat@discuss.tchncs.de 20 points 6 days ago (2 children)

In all distros I've recently used this is what gets installed when you install the "tldr" package with the package manager. And for good reason.

[–] syklemil@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 6 days ago

I'll admit I have no idea what makes one of the Rust implementations preferable over the other. Nor can I go looking at the code myself now that GitHub has hosed itself again

[–] sem@piefed.blahaj.zone 4 points 6 days ago

What is the reason?

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[–] AceSLS@ani.social 12 points 6 days ago (1 children)
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[–] Dumhuvud@programming.dev 23 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Consider using a different name for the project if you care for searchability. There's already Unicode CLDR Project.

[–] girlnamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 11 points 6 days ago (1 children)

damn! I guess I should have looked it up before going with the name. I just liked the play on tldr, cldr.

[–] muzzle@lemmy.zip 9 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Ohh, not bad! If I feel like I need to change it, tlcr is probably the best option

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[–] syklemil@discuss.tchncs.de 20 points 6 days ago (3 children)

You might want to have a glance at the OpenSSF compiler hardening guide, and maybe try out ASAN (-fsanitize=address).

E.g. I get

[nobody@bb14e99a9c8e cldr]$ ./build/cldr --update --language C.
caution: filename not matched:  ethical-tldr/pages.C./*/*.md

=================================================================
==454==ERROR: LeakSanitizer: detected memory leaks

Direct leak of 4 byte(s) in 1 object(s) allocated from:
    #0 0x7fa48a32c0c1 in malloc (/usr/lib/libasan.so.8+0x12c0c1) (BuildId: b8a4241051a1621937fdc46e867ba7ecb56d96ea)
    #1 0x7fa489e8be0f  (/usr/lib/libc.so.6+0x8be0f) (BuildId: 503200d7fda94a5dc6058d7e0694e5d1dcb2e372)
    #2 0x7fa48a2f2761 in vasprintf (/usr/lib/libasan.so.8+0xf2761) (BuildId: b8a4241051a1621937fdc46e867ba7ecb56d96ea)
    #3 0x561d84213d8c in strfmt (/home/nobody/cldr/build/cldr+0x6d8c) (BuildId: 2a0f13efc2c9b12a67e7dd810a2cbdfd1866e53d)

SUMMARY: AddressSanitizer: 4 byte(s) leaked in 1 allocation(s).

Alrighty! I tried out -fsanitize=address and I have now patched every memory leak. There were many...

[–] girlnamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 18 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

Ah damn! That's one of the things I had told myself I needed to make sure I checked, but I forgot! Thanks! I'll look into this tomorrow. Like I said, I literally learned C over the last 3 days to make this, so I'm always happy to learn more!

[–] girlnamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 17 points 6 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Update to this, ~~I actually just fixed that bug, and ~~I went through the first section of the hardening guide. Changes are now pushed to main and I released v1.2.1

[–] axx@slrpnk.net 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I'm not sure why you did this when Tealdeer exists and has for years? https://github.com/tealdeer-rs/tealdeer

My reasoning is simple: I had never heard of it.

But also, this is an incredibly simple program and a really good way to help me learn C. Additionally, it seems like tealdeer accepts ai generated submissions, though generally discourages it. I aim to make my project as free of ai as I possibly can.

[–] chunes@lemmy.world 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (3 children)

I wish people still had shame.

Python isn't for command line utilities that you intend to distribute to others. It's for personal one-off scripts.

I mean, FFS, if you're gonna vibecode something, why not pick a fast language? The fact that they can't even tell the LLM to use the right technology shows that they are a complete imbecile

[–] bort@sopuli.xyz 12 points 6 days ago

Python isn’t for command line utilities that you intend to distribute to others

wat

[–] darklamer@feddit.org 3 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Python isn't for command line utilities that you intend to distribute to others.

Sorry, but you're wrong about this. Python can be an excellent choice for many command line utilities intended for distribution to others.

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[–] Colloidal@programming.dev 6 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (2 children)

Dependancies

[Optional] wget can be installed for less reliance on other projects using ai, if wget is not found, curl will be used instead

  1. Small typo: dependencies.
  2. Is curl using AI in its code now?

Thanks for your work!

[–] girlnamedzero@piefed.zeromedia.vip 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

Update to my previous comment:

1: Fixed!

2: Yes, it seems like it is! According to the open-slopware repository curl does take ai submissions.

[–] Colloidal@programming.dev 7 points 6 days ago

Dang, looks like they went all-in on it.

1: thanks! I’ll fix that soon.

2: this is according to the same friend I talked about, but it would be good to double check her knowledge

[–] MasterBlaster@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago

excellent. however if you are making a point about AI not being as good s a quality developer, you are missing the point.

CEOs don't give a shit about quality and effectiveness. it is all about getting rid of labor costs. once all he few remaining providers of service are absorbed, we take what they give and pay through the nose. monthly.

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