Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 3rd Oct 2012 01:41 UTC, submitted by MOS6510
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Member since:
2010-01-21
Agreed. Not only would it be less boring, but some of my best low-level learning has come from implementing and optimizing a pure Python metadata-extracting GIF parser.
(I'm primarily a Python and PHP programmer, but the only existing Python imaging libraries decoded the entire image into memory when all I wanted was to check whether the GIF was animated, maybe count frames, and maybe do a quick, superficial corruption check.)
In fact, python -m cProfile -s cumulative gif.py ... was where I got clued into how expensive syscalls are... and I'd already taken the entry-level and C/C++ programming courses my University offered.
(Sadly, I'd also read K&R when I had to make that discovery myself. It's an excellent book but makes the assumption that some other resource has already taught you things like what a buffer overflow is and why it's bad.)
Edited 2012-10-03 09:37 UTC