About .NET, googling and lazy programmers.
Delphi fail. .NET win.
Recently, several people sent me bug reports where my EnigmaVB unpacker failed to extract files. In all cases, the problem was caused by really large files, like 3.5GB in size. So, what's causing the problem?
EnigmaVB unpacker is a 32bit application written in Delphi. And Delphi streams are retarded. They look like they've been written in 1990s and were never updated. TMemoryStream uses a continuous memory range, so it can never support anything larger than 2GB. TFileStream internally uses longint, so it doesn't properly support files larger than 2GB. WTF?
So, I have two choices. I can either make a custom stream class in Delphi, or I can pick another framework and rewrite my tool to use that.
I'm not a programmer, I'm a reverser. I don't want to spend my time developing custom stream classes. I'd very much rather use this time breaking some code. So, say hello to .NET framework - my next version of EnigmaVB unpacker will be made in C#.. smile
Am I a programmer or a googler?
While researching all the Delphi limitations and possible workarounds, I ran into this great article by Scott Hanselman. Reading both the post and the comments made me think a lot.
Does using Google to solve your programming tasks makes you less of a programmer? I don't think so.
In fact, I'm just lazy. Most people are. Why should I spend 30 minutes remembering basic algorithms for converting string to hex, if Google query can solve it in 10 seconds? Why reinvent the wheel and write CRC calculation from scratch? I'll just open StackOverflow and have a solution that's already tried and tested. It doesn't mean I can't do those boring tasks - I just don't want to.
How about you? Would you be able to write some tools without using Google and StackOverflow?
